Can guacamole lower your cholesterol as well as other whole-food fat sources like nuts, or is that just spin by the avocado industry?  “Avocados are the richest known fruit source of phytosterols,” the cholesterol-lowering nutrients found in plant foods, brags a review sponsored by the HASS Avocado Board.

The operative word, though, is fruit.

Yes, avocados contain more phytosterols compared to other fruit, but phytosterols are fat-soluble substances. Most other fruits hardly have any fat in them at all, so avocados will obviously come out on top compared to other fruit. What if you compare phytosterol content of avocados to nuts and seeds, though? One avocado has about 100 milligrams of phytosterols. On the same scale, sesame seeds and tahini have 400 milligrams; pistachios, pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds have about 300; almonds, almond butter, flaxseeds, and macadamia nuts have around 200; and even chocolate has about twice as many phytosterols as avocados, as you can see at 0:51 in my video Are Avocados Good for Your Cholesterol.

Even though nuts and seeds have the highest levels of phytosterols overall, the studies that have been done on lowering “bad” LDL cholesterol with phytosterols have used supplements starting with 600 milligrams and going up into the thousands. So, yes, you can lower LDL cholesterol by about 8 percent with a dose of phytosterols around 2,100 milligrams, but that would be 20 avocados a day, as you can see at 1:17 in my video. And 2,100 milligrams of phytosterols would also be a lot of nuts, but you can get an 8 percent drop in LDL by just eating a palmful of nuts, just a single ounce a day, as you can see at 1:36 in my video. So, phytosterols aren’t the only components of nuts responsible for driving down cholesterol. Nuts must have other components, perhaps fiber or other phytonutrients, that contribute to their cholesterol-lowering effects. Might avocados have such components, too? You don’t know until…you put it to the test.

As you can see at 2:10 in my video, there are studies dating back more than a half century that appear to show that if you add an avocado to people’s daily diets, their cholesterol drops. When you remove the daily avocados, however, their cholesterol goes back up, and then it drops down again when you add the avocados back in. The data are pretty convincing—until you see how the study was done. The researchers didn’t just add an avocado. They swapped out animal fat. No wonder their cholesterol went down! Rather than a study about cholesterol and avocados, it may have just as well been about cholesterol and being on or off lard—and nearly all the studies on cholesterol and avocados are like this.   Continued on source:

Source: What Do Avocados Do to Your Cholesterol? | NutritionFacts.org