A six-month trial suggests that daily consumption of a large avocado can slightly reduce the overall glycaemic load of the diet in adults with abdominal obesity, potentially supporting better blood sugar management.
A six-month randomised trial in adults with larger waist measurements suggests that adding one large avocado a day may lower the overall glycaemic load of the diet, even if it does not by itself prove better blood sugar control. The finding comes from a secondary analysis of the Habitual Diet and Avocado Trial, a multicentre study led by researchers from institutions including Loma Linda University, Penn State, Tufts, UCLA and Wake Forest University School of Medicine, and published in Current Developments in Nutrition.
The trial originally enrolled 1,008 adults with abdominal obesity, defined in the study as a waist circumference above 102 centimetres for men and 89 centimetres for women. Of those, 961 participants had complete diet recall data available for this analysis. Volunteers were split into two groups: one continued their usual eating pattern with no more than two avocados a month, while the other added one fresh large avocado, weighing about 168 grams, to their daily diet.
Researchers calculated both glycaemic index and glycaemic load from the participants’ food recalls. Glycaemic load takes into account both the quality and quantity of carbohydrate in the diet, and is used as a measure of the diet’s overall effect on blood sugar. After six months, the avocado group had a glycaemic load that was, on average, 13.7 points lower than the control group.
The authors said the result should not be interpreted as evidence that avocados directly lower blood sugar or prevent diabetes. The study did not measure fasting glucose, HbA1c, the long-term marker of blood sugar control, or diabetes incidence. Instead, the findings point to a broader shift in diet composition when an avocado is added regularly without requiring major changes to the rest of the diet. Earlier reporting on the same research noted that the main HAT trial did not reduce visceral fat, although it did show improvements in diet quality, LDL cholesterol, red blood cell fatty acid composition and the gut microbiome.
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