So Is Avocado Toast Actually Good for You?
Are the fats and carbs in avocado toast good for you? (Photo: Marcus Nilsson)
We teamed up with nutritionist McKel Hill, MS, RD, LDN from Nutrition Stripped to give us some friendly feedback on how we’re doing in the snack department. Are they good for us? Could they be better? We don’t always know, but McKel does. These are our snacks, attacked.
It took some courage, but we finally worked up the guts to ask McKel what we’ve been dying to know since we started this column. Is avocado toast really an okay thing to eat for snack? Slash breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
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Assistant web editor Christina Chaey’s favorite snack is a half an avocado mashed with lemon, sea salt, and red pepper flakes on some kind of wheat-y cracker. Christina is not alone. You guys probably know that we are big fans of the avocado toast around here. While we keep telling ourselves that healthy fats are good for us, truthfully we’re not sure if we’re doing the right thing.
McKel says:
One of my personal favorite snacks! The combination of healthy fats from the avocado and carbohydrates from the cracker are incredible satiating. Lemon, sea salt, and red pepper are just added bonuses for delicious flavor. Ever try mashed avocado with a drizzle of honey, thinly sliced red onion, pinch of sea salt, and red pepper flakes? It’ll change your avocado-toast life.
But McKel, how much avocado is too much avocado? An average-size piece of toast can easily handle a half, but is that too much?
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This is a tricky question to answer, everyone’s fat needs are different, but for the sake of a snack, keep it relatively light but satiating at the same time. I would aim for about ¼–½ avocado for a snack, max. Throughout the day you can eat anywhere between 1–2 servings again, it’s all relative depending on the other sources of fat you’re eating. I hope that makes sense without being too vague…but general public/broad-based nutrition is vague!
As she’s told us in the past, McKel isn’t into calorie counting so you’ll have to monitor your avocado intake yourself. Now, back to the kitchen and my avocado toast. For real: I just whipped up a toasted pumpernickel, smashed avocado, and sliced tomato situation that I’m pretty psyched about. For the record, I’m eating the whole avocado.
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Grab a healthy snack, people, and hang on until dinner.
By Dawn Perry
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