Avocados - Avocado Facts and Health Benefits

Avocados (or by their botanical name, Persea americana), are also known as palta or aguacate in Spanish speaking countries, and are affectionately called "alligator pear" due to their pear shape and bumpy skin.

This fruit is native to Mexico, South and Central America, and belongs to the same plant family of Laurel (Lauraceae): it has a soft, buttery texture and the flesh contains an egg-shaped seed in the center, with a casing called pit.

Originally called "testicle" (or ahuacatl) by Aztecs, this delicious fruit is believed to have been selected by humans, since it was biologically linked to dinosaurs and other large animals: no current animal can eat a fruit so large, and the high amounts of fats and calories, not to mension the size of the seed (it's as large as an egg) all suggest that it was probably dinosaurs who used to eat avocados.

As such, this fruit should have disappeared with their extinction, but it is argued that men kept propagating it, saving avocados from extinction themselves.

Guacamole sauce

Nowadays avocados are widely used for a variety of dishes, including the famous sauce guacamole. Actually, during Super Bowl Sunday, in the US, 50 million pounds of avocados are consumed to make guacamole!

Their nutritional properties are very peculiar, being them not only rich in soluble and insoluble fiber (with some sources claiming it is the most fiber-rich fruit), but also rich in polyunsaturated vegetable fats which have been proven by several studies to lower LDL cholesterol and improve blood lipid levels.

Avocado trees yield lots of fruit if kept in the correct environment (and if they're correctly fertilized and watered): it's no surprise that cultivating them is a hobby in many subtropical climates, so we've put together a page explaining how to grow avocado trees that produce fruit.

Now, more than 80 different cultivars exist, but the most widely cultivated is the Hess variety: a single, healthy tree can produce several hundreds avocados in a year, so trees are used as a warehouse, and fruits are left there for several months when not needed at once!.