Do you have questions about nutrition? Send them to us at comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will solve all your doubts.
I really like avocado, I get to eat several a week. What would be the recommended amount per day? Is eating half a day okay? Thank you. (Carla Martínez, reader)
Hi Carla,
Your question is very good and pertinent because the avocado is very fashionable and its consumption is not always relativized.
It is a perfectly healthy food and, among other things, it has helped us combat the idea that fats are harmful. More or less almost everyone is clear that avocado is healthy and that it has fatty acids very similar to those of olive oil, we could affirm that it has been one of the most present foods on social networks with the healthy label.
We could even maintain a daily consumption, what is important to keep in mind is that it is a source of fat and as such we must count it. For this same reason, avocado is also caloric, and if we maintain the use of oil to which we are accustomed but also add avocado or other sources of healthy fat, we could also be spending too much caloric intake.
It is by no means a food to limit or to warn of the risks of overdoing it, but it must be clarified that it is not a food for free consumption. A good way to gauge its use would be to substitute other sources of oil, such as making avocado toast, using it in spreads such as guacamole, or lining salads with avocado instead of oil.
Therefore, we can find an ally in it to vary our sources of healthy fats.
Hello Aitor. I would like to know if it is useful to drink more water during meals. I have heard that it helps to lose weight, but I do not understand why (María López, reader)
Hello María, it is important to clarify that water does not have magical or slimming properties, and that even though it is the best drink we can consume, we could not even attribute weight control messages to it.
But it is true that incorporating water during meals can be an interesting strategy for this type of diet for two main reasons.
The first of these is because water helps gastric distension and will literally fill our stomach more. With each drink that we take, we slightly help to satiate ourselves, in fact, we have trials in which we have been able to observe that drinking water before meals helps to reduce the amount of food that is consumed in that intake and also to eat a little calmer . Starting our meal with a glass of water can be a very good guideline when sitting at the table.
The second reason is due to the type of drinks to which we are accustomed: in our westernized diet, in a context and in a society in which alcoholic beverages and soft drinks tend to be so present, something as simple as drinking water during meals can help us reduce the prominence of these other not so interesting drinks.
That benefit that is sometimes said to lose weight by drinking water with meals is actually hiding that we stop taking all the empty calories that we previously found in a beer, a soft drink or a glass of wine.
