Your Avocados May be Blowing Your Diet
We pick them up, squeeze them — maybe even sniff them. But no matter what we do, picking a good, ripe, avocado is a real challenge. Even two identical-looking, feeling, smelling, avocados can have wildly different nutritional content, but how is one to know?
At TeakOrigin, our goal is to use data to understand what’s inside the food we buy and eat. One undertaking has been analyzing avocados with the goal of gaining insights that might help you get higher quality avocados, but what we found surprised even us — you might be seriously under-counting critical calories with that avo toast or weekend guac recipe, and here’s why.
What’s ‘Supposed’ to Be Inside Your Avocado
Avocados are one of the most popular produce items on the shelf.
Demand for avocados has steadily increased from 436 million pounds consumed in the US per year in 1985 to over 2600 million pounds in 2019.
A big reason for avocado’s mass appeal is its fat content. In addition to creating the creamy, smooth texture, the types of fat in avocados are deemed “healthy” by many nutritionists. And avocados deliver a lot of fat!
According to the USDA, a medium-sized avocado (201g) delivers 29g of fat, almost half at around 43%, of the total fat recommended for an adult in a day (about 67g for a 2000 calorie diet). A medium-sized avocado is also calorie-dense, delivering 322 calories, or 16% of the calories required for an average adult.
But here’s the problem, those numbers just didn’t match up with our findings.
When we analyzed avocados in 2019 and 2020 in both LA and Boston, we consistently saw a different, much fattier picture. The avocados we measured averaged more than twice as much fat per one medium avocado, 58g or 87% of the daily recommended value, as the USDA standards say they should have. While this finding shows that avocado is much more efficient than expected at delivering those “healthy fats” nutritionists love, it comes at the cost of a serious, and surprising, caloric implication.
A gram of fat contains 9 calories, whereas a gram of carbohydrates or protein has 4 calories and a gram of fiber or water has 0 calories. If there is more fat than expected, it translates into fewer carbs and proteins or less fiber and water, and ultimately more calories — all unknowingly. Yikes.
From our testing, a medium-sized avocado could deliver 522 calories, just in fat, and up to 554 calories in total — versus 322 — as demonstrated in the graphic below. That’s over a quarter of an average adult’s daily caloric intake!
This is not good news for anyone counting calories or measuring their daily intake. Even worse, it creates a mountain of skewed data that consumers rely on, often through third-party nutrition and diet apps.
Why is this happening?
At this point you might be asking yourself — how can this be?
Let’s start with the fact that the samples used to assess the number of fats in avocados, of which the USDA bases its nutrition label, were created from only 8 samples in 2003, more than 17 years ago.
You read that right. Eight samples. Seventeen years ago. That’s nuts!
So much has changed in that time about our world, how we grow our food and the range of nutrients that it actually contains from start to finish, especially once it reaches a person’s plate.
While we were surprised by the large difference in the amount of measured fats, we weren’t surprised that what we observed in avocados — or any food item week over week — is different than what the USDA label claims. That’s because the label, by design, is a static definition of food.
To be clear, the USDA isn’t to blame for this misrepresented information, though. The label is trying to solve a different problem. It is creating a baseline for identifying the nutrition in food rather than telling you what’s inside each and every piece of produce — at that time.
And that’s the problem: we assume baselines tell the whole story even though every piece of food is dynamic. In the case of avocados, this misrepresentation can have direct implications for those tracking calories or the amount of macronutrients (fats, proteins, carbs) they consume.
It’s got to change. We can’t keep making decisions based on bad data.
Conclusion
After our analysis, our data suggest that we’re growing really different avocados then we were 17 years ago. Either that or the avocados used to generate the original baselines our diet and nutrition apps depend on were not representative of what was on the shelves in grocery stores, even less so today.
Whether it’s fats in avocados or another nutrient in a different food, the baseline datasets that we all rely on to understand food will continue to fail us when it comes to identifying what’s inside our ever-dynamic food.
TeakOrigin is enabling the world to ask questions about our food and food system that we could have never asked or tried to answer before. We will continue to scale scientific principles and methods to uncover what’s happening beneath foods surface. The implications — like how we track calories and the basic building blocks for knowing what we’re putting into our bodies — are too big to ignore.
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TeakOrigin is a food data company staffed with a passionate team of food and data scientists on a mission to help people have better control over their food decisions by showing what’s happening inside of food. TeakOrigin uses a combination of analytical chemistry, optical spectroscopy, and machine learning — for rapid, nondestructive, and highly accurate quality assessment of foods’ authenticity, quality, and freshness.
