In Praise of Avocados
Avocados are both healthy and delicious. When I am not fasting, I typically eat an avocado a day in my giant salad. I am glad I am not the only fan of avocados. Bee Wilson, in her delightful February 16, 2018 pocket history of avocados, "What Explains Our Mania for Avocados," writes:
In the U.S., demand for avocados is now so frenzied that it threatens to outstrip supply. The average American consumes 7 pounds of avocado a year, up from 1 pound in 1974. By 2016, annual retail sales of avocados in the U.S. had reached $1.6 billion, according to the Hass Avocado Board.
Bee agrees with my assessment of avocados:
Few other ingredients taste at once so dreamily rich and so healthy. ...
Avocado is one of the few modern foods that manages to straddle our ideas of both comfort and health.
Among the many cultural, technological and economic factors that have driven the increasing popularity of avocados, a key factor has been Americans beginning to turn away from the lowfat orthodoxy has gripped us for so long. As Bee writes:
Our avocado-love has also been driven by cultural changes, large and small: the popularity of tacos, the rise of the hipster cafe, the rehabilitation of fat as a health food. ...
In the 1980s, at the height of low-fat orthodoxy, avocado was regarded as dangerously fattening, and the wholesale price plummeted to 10 cents a pound.
Even better, in many circles nowadays, people realize both
- avocados are healthy
- sugar is unhealthy.
Don't miss these other posts on diet and health and on fighting obesity:
- Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts
- Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid
- Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
- The Problem with Processed Food
- Which Is Worse for You: Sugar or Fat?
- Our Delusions about 'Healthy' Snacks—Nuts to That!
- My Giant Salad
- Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index
- How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed
- Why You Should Worry about Cancer Promotion by Diet as Much as You Worry about Cancer Initiation by Carcinogens
- Good News! Cancer Cells are Metabolically Handicapped
- How Sugar, Too Much Protein, Inflammation and Injury Could Drive Epigenetic Cellular Evolution Toward Cancer
- Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
- The Keto Food Pyramid
- Sugar as a Slow Poison
- How Sugar Makes People Hangry
- Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet
- Hints for Healthy Eating from the Nurse's Health Study
- The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes
- The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes
- Gary Taubes Makes His Case to Nick Gillespie: How Big Sugar and a Misguided Government Wrecked the American Diet
- A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research
- Magic Bullets vs. Multifaceted Interventions for Economic Stimulus, Economic Development and Weight Loss
- Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out
- Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners
- Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy
- Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
- Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
- Diseases of Civilization
- Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression
- Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food
- Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
- Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review
- Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
- Confirmation Bias in the Interpretation of New Evidence on Salt
- Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So
- Is Milk OK?
- How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy
- Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
- 'Forget Calorie Counting. It's the Insulin Index, Stupid' in a Few Tweets
- Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
- Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities
- On Fighting Obesity
- The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness
- Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
- Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'
- Podcast: Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation
Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life" and the podcast "Miles Kimball Explains to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal Why Losing Weight Is Like Defeating Inflation." If you want to know how I got interested in diet and health and fighting obesity and a little more about my own experience with weight gain and weight loss, see my post "A Barycentric Autobiography."