Avocado toast has become the favored breakfast of the healthy and fit, and now new research suggests their choice may protect their hearts. People who ate half an avocado twice a week had a 16% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 21% lower risk of heart disease, compared with people who never or rarely ate the fruit, researchers found. “This study provides further evidence that the intake of plant-sourced unsaturated fats can improve diet quality and is an important component in cardiovascular disease prevention in the general population,” said lead researcher Lorena Pacheco, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “Our results are timely, since the nationwide consumption of avocado has risen steeply in the U.S. in the last 20 years,” she noted. This type of observational study cannot prove definitively that eating avocados lowered the risk for …