Avocados are a
nutritious food, providing heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, fiber,
potassium, magnesium, copper and manganese, as well as most of the B
vitamins and vitamins C, E and K. You can eat them in moderation as part
of a weight-loss diet or add them to your regular diet as a
concentrated source of calories to help you gain weight.
Each of the
smaller, dark-skinned avocados from California contains about 227
calories, 2.7 grams of protein, 11.8 grams of carbohydrate and 21 grams
of fat. The majority of the carbohydrates are in the form of fiber, with
9.2 grams, or 37 percent of the daily value, and only 2.9 grams of the
fat consist of unhealthy saturated fat. The rest mostly comes from
healthy monounsaturated fats. The green-skinned Florida avocados tend to
be much larger, so a whole avocado has about 365 calories and 30.5
grams of fat. A cup of cubed avocado of either type has approximately
240 calories.
If you're trying
to gain weight, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends adding
a source of concentrated calories to each meal. You don't want to add
just any high-calorie food to your meals, however. FamilyDoctor.org
suggests choosing nutrient-dense foods, such as avocados, rather than
junk foods. If you eat lots of high-calorie junk foods, you could
increase your risk for health problems like type-2 diabetes and heart
disease due to the large amounts of sugar, saturated fat and salt
typically in this type of food.
A study published
in "Nutrition" in January 2005 compared subjects who ate 200 grams per
day of avocado, which includes about 30.6 grams of mainly
monounsaturated fat, to those who ate 30 grams of mixed fats from other
food sources. All the participants consumed reduced-calorie diets.
Researchers reported that the avocado eaters lost about the same amount
of weight as those who didn't eat avocado. While diets high in
monounsaturated fat may not result in more weight loss than low-fat
diets, they may be better than a low-fat diet for improving insulin
resistance and cholesterol levels, according to a review article
published in "Nutrition Reviews" in 2010.
If you want to
lose weight, you have to eat fewer calories than you burn through your
daily activity. This means replacing other, less healthy foods with
avocado rather than adding it to your diet. To gain weight, you need to
do the opposite, adding avocado or other high-calorie foods to your
meals to increase the total calories you are eating. Nuts, nut butters,
seeds, cheese and olive oil are examples of other foods that are high in
both nutrients and calories.
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