Only 25 percent of the vitamin C in an Orange is in the flesh, the remaining 75 percent of vitamin C is in the peel and the white membrane (albedo) under the peel. Also, did you know that Florida grown Avocados have only half the fat of Avocados from California? - Millet

thats why I love kumquats! MMMM edible skin!

there are many types of avacadoes, Id read about lower fat avacadoes on a store display. I didnt prefer the FL type over the CA type, but if I had fresh avacadoes on a regular basis, id probably choose the lower fat variety.

Is it the variety of avocados or where they are grown that makes the difference?

soils and climate can effect color, micronutrients, and sweetness, but fat content should be a variety trait.


http://www.chowhound.com/topics/343428 Post about a screen down by Eat Nopal says there is a difference between oily and watery varieties

There are two distinct strains of avocados. The
varieties grown in California are offshoots of the original
Mexican and Guatemalan avocados. Those grown in Florida are
derived from the West Indies avocados. Since the soil,
amount of moisture, and climate of Southern California
differ from that of southern Florida, the varieties that
thrive on the West Coast don't do nearly as well on the East
Coast, and vice versa.

While the avocado from either area is a quality
product, there are significant differences in size, texture,
and flavor. The Florida avocados offer advantages in size
and often in price. They are usually at least twice as
large as those from California and often less costly. The
smaller, most expensive California avocados have more of
the desired nutlike flavor and a richer, creamier texture
than the more watery Florida fruit. A California avocado is
to a Florida avocado as ice cream is to ice milk. However,
the Florida avocado has fewer calories.

Millet

Thanks Millet,
I guess the ones I have always bought have come from outside Florida. I have seen the bigger ones in the store, but always bought the small ones because they were just the right size for sandwiches. I will have to try the others just for comparison. At least Avocado fat is a good fat!

One very important thing to note, the types of fats are HDL compatible and these are the types of fat from avocadoes and nuts in general. The higher the HDL compatible fat contents the better they are for you.

Otherwise, why would you eat nuts, particularly almonds if they are high in fats? Avocadoes are the same way, they improve your HDL.

Caveat: One must exercise when one eats avocadoes or nuts, only then you will get the HDL benefits.

Avocadoes, especially those with higher fats, and from California, are better than nuts in several ways.

Six Ways Avocados Keep You Healthy
Crushes Cholesterol
The avocado is high in fat - 30 grams per fruit, but it is mostly monounsaturated fat. This fat helps protect good HDL cholesterol, while wiping out the bad LDL cholesterol that clogs your arteries. That means you not only lower your bad cholesterol, you also improve your ratio of good HDL to total cholesterol.

But there is more than just monounsaturated fat at work. An avocado contains ten grams of fiber, as well as a plant chemical called beta-sitosterol. These both help lower cholesterol. Throw in vitamins C and E - powerful antioxidants that prevent dangerous free radicals from reacting with the cholesterol in your blood - and it all adds up to a healthier you.

One study from Australia demonstrated how eating half to one-and-a-half avocados a day for three weeks could lower your total cholesterol by more than eight percent without lowering your HDL cholesterol.

During the same study, a low fat, high-carbohydrate diet also lowered the participants' total cholesterol - but slashed the "good" cholesterol by almost 14 percent.

Bashes High Blood Pressure
You have probably heard that the banana is a good source of potassium. What you probably do not know is that avocados, with over 1,200 milligrams of potassium per fruit, contain more than two-and-a-half times as much potassium as a banana. This is important because many studies show that potassium helps lower your blood pressure.

Magnesium, another important mineral found in avocados, could help lower your blood vessels and allow them to open wider. This will give your blood more room to flow freely, reducing blood pressure. But results have been mixed. Some studies show magnesium lowers blood pressure, while others show no effect.

Strikes out Stroke
When it comes to taking on a deadly killer like stroke, who wants to fight fair? Gang up on stroke with avocado's three heavy hitters - potassium, magnesium and fiber.

Hammer Heart Disease
By controlling your cholesterol and blood pressure, avocados can help reduce your risk of heart disease.

But avocados offer more protection. If you increase your daily fiber intake by ten grams, the amount in one avocado, you decrease your risk of heart disease by 10 percent. Vitamin C, potassium, and folate, part of the B-vitamin family, have also been linked to a reduced risk of heart disease.

Folate also helps your heart by keeping homocysteine from building up to dangerous levels. Homocysteine, a by-product of protein metabolism, can harm your arteries and increase your chances of a heart attack or stroke.

According to the California Avocado Commission, avocados have more folate per ounce than any other fruit.

Defends Against Diabetes
If you have diabetes, you are probably looking for ways to replace the saturated fat in your diet with more carbohydrates. Instead, consider substituting some of those carbohydrates with monounsaturateed fat, the kind you get from avocados. Not only do avocados lower your LDL cholesterol without lowering HDL cholesterol, they also can reduce the amount of triglycerides, another type of fat, in your blood. A high triglyceride level can be a warning sign of heart disease.

Eating high fiber foods, like avocados, can benefit people with type 2 diabetes in several ways. One study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that a high fiber diet (50 grams per day) lowered cholesterol, triglyceride, glucose and insulin levels.

Avocados have earned the backing of the American Diabetes Association, which has included avocados in its collection of suggested recipes.

Curbs Cancer
Another reason to eat a lot of fiber is its possible protective effect against certain cancers, particularly colon and breast cancer. Although a few studies suggest fiber may not be as effective as other studies show in preventing cancer, many experts still recommend eating plenty of high fiber foods.

Avocado's arsenal of powerful antioxidants - glutathione and vitamin C - also help fight cancer by neutralizing harmful free radicals that can damage your cells. Glutathione may ward off oral and throat cancers and vitamin C has been linked to lower rates of oral, breast, lung, stomach and cervical cancers. And do not forget beta-sitosterol and folate. They may protect your from colon and breast cancer, too. The avocado provides more of several nutrients than 20 of the most commonly eaten fruits. Including avocado in an otherwise healthful diet can be considered a healthy way to add variety to your meals.


Treat Yourself to an Avocado Facial
Beauty, they say, is only skin deep. Luckily, avocado has moisturizing power to help make your skin more beautiful. For years, people have used avocado as a natural facial treatment, especially for dry skin. It is easy to do in your own home. Just remove your makeup and wash your face with warm water and soap or your favorite cleanser. Mash some avocado and mix it with a little milk or oatmeal and apply it to your face. Leave it there for ten minutes, then rinse it off with lots of water.

If you have dry skin, or just want to pamper yourself, reach for an avocado - the bumpy fruit that smoothes your skin.

http://heartdisease.about.com/cs/cholesterol/a/raiseHDL.htm

Increase the monounsaturated fats in your diet. Monounsaturated fats such as canola oil, avocado oil, or olive oil and in the fats found in peanut butter can increase HDL cholesterol levels without increasing the total cholesterol.

Some of these info could be "hyped", so exercise discretion:


http://www.all-about-lowering-cholesterol.com/avocado-cholesterol-and-avocado-fat.html

Avocado Cholesterol

Lowering cholesterol with avocado fat.
Avocado cholesterol diet can lower cholesterol by 8 percent because of the avocado fat, compared with 5 percent for the low-fat diet.
Avocado cholesterol diet is beneficial for lowering cholesterol, despite of avocado fat content and carbohydrate. The reason is that avocado is a great source of heart-healthy monounsaturated fat. The avocado fat is a type of fat that may actually help to raise levels of HDL ("good"cholesterol) which actually protects arteries, while lowering levels of LDL ("bad" cholesterol).

In case you are not familiar, HDL or the good cholesterol is the one that cleanses the arteries from the LDL or bad cholesterol build up. So, it flows naturally that the higher the HDL/good cholesterol the less is LDL/bad cholesterol.

Types of fat and avocado fat.

You need not worry about the avocado content of fat, as this fat is not harmful nor does it increase your cholesterol levels. To distinguish the types of fat, including avocado fat, you need to understand saturated fats, monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats.

Saturated fats, are those types of fat that are harmful and increase cholesterol levels. However, monounsaturated fats(avocado fat is of this type) and polyunsaturated fats, are not harmful and do not increase cholesterol levels. On the contrary monounsaturated fat and avocado fat help lower cholesterol.

Avocado cholesterol lowering effect.

According to a recent study in Brisbane, Australia reported that eating avocados daily for three weeks improved blood cholesterol in middle-aged women better than a low-fat diet did. The avocado diet reduced total cholesterol 8 percent compared with 5 percent for the low-fat diet. Most important, avocados improved the good HDL-cholesterol ratio by 15 percent.

The daily amount of avocado ranged from 1/2 avocado for small women to 1 1/2 for large women. Expected outcome: By eating avocados, heart patients could cut their risk of heart attack 10-20 percent and death rates 4-8 percent in 3-5 years.

Why avocado fat lowers cholesterol?

As mentioned above, avocado fat content is the reason to lower cholesterol since it is monounsaturated fat.

Another reason is that avocado packs more of the cholesterol-smashing beta-sitosterol (a beneficial plant-based fat) than any other fruit. Beta-sitosterol reduces the amount of cholesterol absorbed from food. So the combination of beta-sitosterol and monounsaturated fat makes the avocado an excellent cholesterol buster.

Beta-Sitosterol has an apparent ability to block the bad LDL cholesterol absorption from the intestine, resulting in lower blood cholesterol levels. The Australian study not only reported that eating either half or a whole avocado fruit per day for a month succeeded in lowering cholesterol levels, but at the same time most people in the study lost weight.

What is beta-sitosterol?

A phytosterol or plant alcohol that is literally in every vegetable we eat. We already eat this every day but we just don't get enough of it. The typical American is estimated to eat only 200-400 mg a day while vegetarians probably eat about twice this much. This is surely one of the many reasons vegetarians are healthier and live longer.

Actually the term "beta-sitosterol" in commerce refers to the natural combination of beta-sitosterol, stigmasterol, campesterol and brassicasterol as this is how they are made by nature in plants. There are no magic foods with high levels of phytosterols, but they can be inexpensively extracted from sugar cane pulp, soybeans and pine oil.

There are over 50 published medical and clinical studies done on humans and animals since the 1950s with beta-sitosterol. All of these were stringent scientific studies published in international scientific journals.

These studies establish that beta-sitosterol substantially lowers blood serum cholesterol and triglyceride levels with few or no changes in diet or exercise. Reductions of up to 50% have been reported.

Just to give you one example. A very interesting study was done at the Center for Human Nutrition in France (Ann. Nutr. Metab. 39, 1995, p. 291-5) in that healthy people with normal cholesterol levels were given beta- sitosterol to see if their normal levels could be lowered even further. We always think of studies as using unhealthy people with pathological cholesterol levels given supplements to make them normal again.

Amazingly enough the healthy people lowered their normal cholesterol levels even more with no change in diet or exercise. In fact, they were a full 10% lower in only a month. This kind of effect is really fascinating.

They said, "The present results may be of great interest in the prevention of high cholesterol diet-associated risks, especially in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Since beta-sitosterol was so effective for people who didn't even need it, think what it will do for those people who do need to lower their blood lipids.

They concluded, "These findings suggest that a significant lowering of plasma total and LDL cholesterol can be effected by a modest dietary intake of soybean phytosterols."

So whatever avocado taste the best for you, go for it, never worry about the fat contents...

just my recommendations.

as for me, I would go with Philippine Avocadoes, they're the best, super-creamy, and sometimes weighing 2 lbs each fruit, but it is going to cost me at least $573 to enjoy one, and in December the cost of obtaining one is about $1,985.

To keep this in topic, for those that are non-kumquat types, I would peel off the citrus and eat whole sectors and albedos, (except grapefruits). They are indeed higher in vitamin C. I often remove the zest in the skin and mix in citrus wine in order to help protect the wine from aging and oxidation because of the vitamin C that can also be found in the zest.

I've been meaning to ask this question for a while since joining and, since the subject has been brought up, it's an opportune time to do so!

Joe Real may remember a Sacramento radio garden show host, Dan Pratt, aka The Garden Doctor. I recall him saying several times over a period of perhaps 5-10 years that 80% of the Vitamin C in an orange is lost within (this is the part my memory gets foggy) something like 24 hours after picking. He was generally a source of reliable information and backed it up by sometimes quoting university research. I believe he made reference to such university research when talking about this subject. At the same time, I find this rather hard to believe. Does anyone have any sort of information on this?

Thanks in advance!

as far as I know, light and air do the damage to vitamin C, so cut peppers, citrus, canned fruit, etc tend to be lower in Vit C.

That is true Harvey, the exposure to air. This also protects the citrus fruits from turning brown when opened. that is why putting lemon juice on potatoes or apples will prevent them from turning brown. The acids (citric, ascorbic [vit. C], and others) helps mitigate the effects of air. Also when you immerse fish in lemon juice or calamondin juice, you can keep them longer in the freezer without getting freezer burns.

Plus, the degradation of vitamin C is also hastened by light exposure, thus the term photo-oxidation. Also, if you cut citrus with anything metal, even surgical stainless steel or platinum knife, they will serve as catalysts to the degradation of vitamin C. So I always peel my citruses off by hand and eat them right away. Excepting of course those grapefruits and lemons and other condiment type citruses.

That is also why I never use metal stirrers when making juice from concentrate, or even making lemonade fresh from the tree. But even if you cut them with a knife and use metal stirrers, expose them to the air, there's significant amount left for you. Plus most foods are naturally high in Vitamin C. If you eat guavas, that is one tropical fruit that is loaded with vitamin C, the highest per unit weight, several times better than citruses. Then there is that horseradish tree or Moringa oleifera, the leaves have even about 5 times more vitamin C per unit weight than guavas.

The reason why vitamin C is a good anti-oxidant is that it sacrifices itself for the oxidation part and also readily captures free radicals. We should be thankful that citruses contains some vitamin C even if it is not as high compared to other fruits or sources. Mankind does not live by citruses alone,