Should You Be Eating Avocados Often?

It seems everyone loves eating avocados these days. It’s being used in all sorts of foods like salads, sandwiches, and even some ridiculous creations I’ve never heard of until recently like avocado toast and smoothies. Indeed, avocados are full of nutrients. But at what price does the current avocado craze come with?

Nutritional Information of Avocados

The most common cultivar of avocado in the world is the Hass avocado. It makes up about 80% of the world’s total avocado output. The average Hass avocado weighs about 200-300 g and contains about 300-350 calories. Each one contains about 29 g of fat, of which about 24 g is unsaturated fat (mostly monounsaturated fat); about 17 g of carbohydrates (mostly from dietary fiber); and about 4 g of protein.

Hass avocados also contain plenty of other nutrients. It’s especially rich in pantothenic acid, vitamin B₆, folate, and vitamin K. In addition, it contains thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin C, vitamin E, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc.

As a result of its nutrient-dense nature, avocados provide a number of health benefits. The high fiber content helps with digestion and gut health. Unsaturated fats help improve your cholesterol profile, which in turn improves heart health. The potassium in avocados helps your circulatory system. Avocados also have lutein and zeaxanthin, two antioxidants that help maintain eye function.

How Much Should You Eat?

Despite their great taste and rich nutrient content, you shouldn’t go overboard with eating avocados. Avocados are rich in fat, and that means they’re high in calories. While the calories in avocados are certainly better than other “empty” calories, like refined sugars, calories are still calories. Eating just two avocados provides about 600-700 calories, which is about one third of your daily calorie intake. In addition, two avocados contain about 88% of your daily recommended fat intake and 42% of your daily saturated fat intake. That doesn’t leave much room to eat things that contain the other nutrients you need, like protein and high-quality carbohydrates.

Because of this, nutritionists recommend that you limit yourself to eating about half an avocado a day, and just one full avocado a day at most. Certain people who have a latex allergy should also limit their avocado consumption because they could develop latex-fruit syndrome over time. The reason behind this is that some of the proteins in avocados are similar enough to the ones in latex to cause cross-reactivity. Latex-fruit syndrome generally manifests as an itchiness in the mouth and throat shortly after consumption. But it can also cause abdominal pain and vomiting and can sometimes be life-threatening.

Costs of the West’s New Avocado Obsession

Due to the increase in demand for avocados, places around the world that grow them have stepped up production. Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and Columbia account for most of the world’s production. But this increased output has caused a number of problems, both for the people living there and for the environment. In fact, because of these problems, some restaurants have stopped serving avocados.

Social Costs

As with many popular commodity crops like cocoa and coffee, avocados are grown as cash crops. That means they’re grown mainly for exporting to other countries. This sets up a situation where farmers are entirely dependent on getting their products to international markets to earn money. As a result, it naturally invites exploitation and extortion.

For example, in Mexico, the world’s largest producer of avocados, organized crime gangs and drug cartels, like the Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, often demand that farmers pay them a large portion of their profits. Farmers who refuse risk having their fields burned or their family members killed. The farmers are also forced to pay their employees less to account for this loss of revenue. So, it’s not a joke that your avocados from Mexico are helping fund the criminals responsible for the huge amount of violence in the country right now.

Environmental Costs

Avocados aren’t good for the environment either, especially with the way farmers currently grow and ship them. Like with other cash crops, in order to maximize profits, farmers grow only avocados in the same fields year after year. To be fair, avocados grow on trees, so they take a few years to grow. But doing so still makes the crops more vulnerable to pests since the pests only have one crop (and its anti-pest measures) to adapt to. As a result, more pesticides are needed, which can disrupt the local ecosystem. Single-crop planting also depletes the soil of vital nutrients, leading to the increased use of fertilizer.

Avocados grow best in tropical and Mediterranean climates, which unfortunately is also where forests thrive. In order to allow avocado trees to grow better or to make more land available for avocado farming, farmers clear out forests. Deforestation not only hurts the local ecosystem but also contributes to global warming. The fact that most avocados are consumed far from where they’re grown is also a problem. The fuel and material costs to ship avocados to their far-off destinations contribute to global warming as well.

Lastly, avocados are water-hungry crops. They require deep-watering during the spring, summer, and fall to ensure a good yield. They take, on average, about twice the amount of water to grown an equal amount (in weight) of oranges and about three times as much water to grow that amount of grapes.

In especially dry areas like Petorca, Chile (another large producer), it can take even more water. There, each hectare (10,000 m² or 107,639 ft²) of avocado trees needs 100,000 L of water per day. That’s about the same amount 1000 people use in a day. Needless to say, the widespread cultivation of avocados in the area has led to numerous water shortages. Even in more temperate California, the largest producer in the US, the water requirements of avocados were quite clear during the last few years when widespread drought conditions made them costly to grow. As global warming intensifies, droughts will only get more common, and these crops will stress the availability of water.

The Takeaway

While the above problems don’t mean you should stop eating avocados completely, it does mean that you should be more mindful about what goes into growing them and maybe cut back on how many you do eat. You could also just get the nutrients in avocados from other foods. None of the nutrients in avocados are unique to them.

The problems associated with avocados aren’t exclusive to them, so they won’t all go away if you stop eating them. Instead, try not to treat them (and similar exotic, foreign-grown foods) as trendy new fads. Each time one of those foods becomes wildly popular, it has the potential to start the same problems.