In the past few years avocados have gone from niche grocery item to a staple of the weekly shop in most households thanks to their superfood properties. But it turns out that they might not actually be all that good for you thanks to some new research that suggests they could increase the risk of heart disease.

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The study was performed by the University of Cambridge and suggests that the “healthy fats” contained in avocados – as well as other foods like nuts and fish – could increase the risk of heart disease. These foods are generally thought to increase your “good cholesterol”, also known as high-density lipoprotein.

The team came to this conclusion after examining rare gene mutations which can also lead to high levels of good cholesterol. They discovered that people with this mutation in a gene called SCARB1 (about 1 in 1700 people) were 80% more likely than your average person to have a heart attack.

Professor Adam Butterworth, who was in charge of the study, said the following:

This is significant because we had always believed that good cholesterol is associated with a lower risk of heart disease.

This is one of the first studies to show that some people that have high levels of ‘good’ cholesterol actually have a higher risk of heart disease so it challenges our conventional wisdom about whether ‘good’ cholesterol is protecting people from heart disease or not.

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There’s always something isn’t there? To be honest, it sounds like a bit of a stretch linking “good cholesterol” to heart disease, as it mainly just seems to be the SCARB1 gene that causes this condition and not necessarily eating avocados, fish or nuts. Think Butterworth probably needs to do some more tests before rolling out statements like that, but in this day and age almost everything you can ever eat is bad for you, so you might as well just enjoy what you like eating and do it that way from now on.

For more reasons why avocados suck, click here. Not as great as you once thought.