Functional Nutrition
The Holy Avocado
The avocado contains Avocatin B, a mixture of lipids that inhibits fatty acid oxidation in the body. This could help prevent insulin resistance, diabetes, and potentially certain tumors.
Functional Nutrition
The avocado contains Avocatin B, a mixture of lipids that inhibits fatty acid oxidation in the body. This could help prevent insulin resistance, diabetes, and potentially certain tumors.
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Unfortunately, we all too often lose the fun of it.
You tell people they should eat as locally as possible – what gets understood is: never eat anything from abroad again. That's how it is with everything. "Pay attention to your (exaggerated) coffee consumption" becomes understood as "edubily said coffee is bad, so I'll never drink it again." And so on.
But the point is rarely about 100% – a good trick is to be satisfied with 80 or 90%. Life becomes much more pleasant because exaggerated perfectionism falls away. And these 80–90% are enough to get very close to your happiness in life (in many areas), while at the same time leaving enough room for flexibility, growth, and hormesis.
So let's finally get to today's topic. Ever heard of Avocatin B? Sounds chemical – but you still can't buy this miracle substance at the pharmacy. You only get it from one fruit that has to be shipped from Central and South America. We're talking about the avocado. Not quite "locally seasonal," but healthy. Because: it contains two lipids (avocadenes & avocadynes), which are collectively called Avocatin B, and this mixture of substances is medicine.
edubily readers by now know (hopefully – if not, please read our book for example), that excessive fatty acid oxidation in the muscle is not good. Because a muscle should always be fishing sugar from the bloodstream nicely, so that insulin stays low – but if a muscle only oxidizes fats, it doesn't consume carbohydrates. This (reciprocal) relationship between fat and carbohydrate oxidation was named after its discoverer, called the Randle cycle.
Overweight or other reasons for high fatty acid concentration in the blood cause a constant high pressure of fatty acids at the cellular level. Constantly large amounts of these fatty acids must be burned. This eventually causes insulin resistance and later diabetes. Therefore, there are substances that slow down this excessive fatty acid oxidation. [Source no longer available], which tennis star Maria Sharapova abused as a doping agent.
Now nature comes along and says: Hey, I've had something for you all along. A mixture of substances that does exactly that. Avocatin B inhibits fatty acid oxidation. Important: We're talking about biology, where there's no "all or nothing," so fatty acid oxidation is logically only slowed down a bit. But that's enough to protect animals in studies from insulin resistance and diabetes. Isn't that brilliant? Nature always has the right "little pill" or antidote for our afflictions.
But that's not all. A brand new study shows that some tumors depend precisely on such increased fatty acid oxidation. That makes sense: tumors need a lot of energy. Some get it from sugar (glucose), others more from fatty acids. So scientists looked for a substance that inhibits this:
His team examined numerous nutraceutical compounds looking for a substance that could inhibit the enzyme. "And lo and behold: the best substance came from the avocado," says Spagnuolo.
Funny, right? Though that doesn't mean avocados are the new chemotherapy and we don't even know if the amounts in avocados have any significant benefit in the body. But the fact is, it's a good example of how a healthy diet constantly flushes such substances into us. And rarely does one substance work alone – usually it's the mixture of substances that's responsible for a synergistic effect. By the end of the day, some effect still sticks around.
Ergo: Guacamole may not be local, but who cares at this point?
