NBC NEWS – Researchers are kicking off a tasty study that may leave you green with envy.
Dr. Zhaoping Li and her colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles are recruiting people to eat an entire avocado every day for six months, and get paid to do so.
Their question is: Will the high-fat, high-calorie fruit help or hinder efforts to shed dangerous belly fat?
The research will build on a smaller study that compared two groups of people on a calorie-restricted diet.
The only difference? One group ate a daily avocado.
After three months both groups lost the same amount of weight.
What’s more, the avocado group felt full on the restricted calorie diet, while the others were left kind of hungry.
“We not only need to watch the calories, but more so, we need to really pay attention to quality of calories,” Dr. Li says.
The study has funding from the avocado industry, but it’s also backed by well-respected schools: UCLA, Penn State, Tufts University and Loma Linda University in California.
The research will include about 1,000 study subjects and will compensate participants, not only with daily avocados, but also around $300 for their time and effort.
