Findings from a new study suggest that eating one avocado per day may help improve sleep. Funded by the Avocado Nutrition Center, the study – published in the Journal of the American Heart Association and reported in SciTechDaily – sought to evaluate the impact of regular avocado consumption on cardiovascular health.
Researchers used the American Heart Association Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) framework to assess diet quality, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep, body weight, blood pressure, blood lipids and blood glucose – the leading factors and behaviours contributing to better heart health outcomes.
Daily avocado intake was associated with improvements in three areas, including sleep health. While the study was not designed to examine sleep as a primary outcome, the findings offer an intriguing new line of inquiry for future research on how the nutrients in avocados may support sleep and other aspects of cardiovascular health.
Regular avocado consumption, while showing modest improvements in some areas, was not enough to translate to an improved LE8 score, leading the researchers to hypothesise that the metric may be too insensitive to small changes. This presents an issue as current guidance for lifestyle counselling in clinical settings is to prioritise small incremental changes, and an unaffected LE8 score may discourage these important steps.
The study included 969 racially and ethnically diverse American adults who had elevated waist circumference, a cardiovascular risk common among adults in the US. Participants were randomly assigned to either eat one avocado per day or to consume very few avocados (less than two per month) for six months, with both groups otherwise maintaining their usual diet. Measurements were taken at the beginning to establish baselines and again at the end of the six-month period.
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Those consuming avocados daily improved their scores in diet quality and blood lipids, likely due to modest reductions in total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations compared to the low-consumption group.
Avocados are nutritionally dense, rich in monounsaturated fatty acids, dietary fibre, potassium, folate (vitamin B-9), vitamin K, copper and pantothenic acid (vitamin B5). A third of the dietary fibre in avocados is soluble fibre, which helps block cholesterol absorption, and monounsaturated fats can help lower LDL cholesterol levels, reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Daily consumption of avocados, the researchers speculate, may have also displaced unhealthy food components. They posit that the improved diet quality is a potential contributing factor to the greater improvement in sleep health.
A single serving – a third of a medium avocado – contains 13 milligrams of tryptophan, an essential amino acid and precursor to melatonin, which helps regulate sleep, as well as 45 micrograms of folate or 10 percent of the daily value (DV) recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration. Folate helps support the production of melatonin and low folic acid levels have been linked to severe difficulty sleeping. A serving of avocado also has 15 milligrams (4 percent of the recommended daily intake) of magnesium, which plays a role in muscle contraction and relaxation.
The researchers caution that their findings are not conclusive and cannot be generalised to all populations, but they should encourage further research into the potential for this nutrient-rich food to support aspects of cardiovascular health. Avocados are part of the Mediterranean diet, which is consistently linked with lower risk factors for heart disease and one of the top diets recommended by nutrition experts.
