Anti-Inflammatory Effects of Guacamole 

   shared in his NutritionFacts.org blog that he put High-fat plant foods—avocados, peanuts, and walnuts—and olive oil to the test.

In the preface of his book How Not to Die, after bemoaning the fact that although Big Pharma offered him countless steak dinners during my medical training, Big Broccoli never asked him out. Dr. Greger wrote that you’ll probably never see an ad on TV for whole natural foods because there just isn’t much of markup, they aren’t shelf-stable, and you can’t brand them, patent them, or trademark them. Real food just isn’t as profitable as junk. But, he may have to eat those words. As he discusses in his video Flashback Friday: The Effects of Avocados on Inflammationthere was a TV ad for avocados—aired during the Super Bowl, no less—and it wasn’t for avocado-flavored Doritos or something like that. It was an ad for the actual fruit. Thanks in part to the billions of avocados sold every year, the Avocado Board has $50 million—not only for ads but for research, too.

Dr. Gregor touched previously on the burger study, in which the addition of avocado blunted the spike in inflammation one gets within hours of eating meat. Amazing. The burger with more added fat and more calories from the avocado produced less inflammation, perhaps because the added fat and calories were in the form of whole plant food, which tends to be packed with antioxidants that can inhibit the formation of oxidized fats that are formed when meat is cooked and when it hits your stomach acid. 

Do other high-fat, high-calorie whole plant foods have the same protective effect? What about peanuts, for example. Not to be outdone by Big Guac, the Peanut Institute funded a study with the understanding that most of us spend most of our waking hours in a postprandial state—that is, an after-meal state—and the fat from those meals that courses through our systems are “a well-recognized risk factor for atherosclerosis,” the number one killer of men and women, manifesting as “impaired endothelial function.” That means we may have crippled artery function within hours of eating something crappy, like a milkshake, about 1,200 calories of mostly sugar and heavy cream. Well, what if you drank that same milkshake with 3 ounces of peanuts thrown in? 

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