How much

How much fat should I eat a day?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20266 sources

Between 20 and 35% of your calories. On 2,000 calories that’s about 44 to 78 g of fat a day. Inside that, keep saturated fat under 10%, about 22 g. The tool below works out both for your calories.

The range is wide on purpose. A day built on olive oil, nuts and fish can sit at the top of it, and a day of grains, beans and lean meat can sit near the bottom, and both can be healthy. What changes your blood is the kind of fat, so that’s where we’d spend the attention.

What we’d do: stop counting total fat and pick the kind. Olive or canola oil, nuts, seeds, avocado and fish go up, and butter, cheese and fatty meat come down until saturated fat is under your line.

The band at common calorie levels

The math is calories × 0.20 ÷ 9 for the bottom and × 0.35 ÷ 9 for the top, since fat has 9 calories a gram. These are the US guideline’s lines. The Gyroscope app personalizes yours.

The label’s Daily Value for fat is 78 g, the same for everyone. On 2,000 calories that’s exactly the top of the band, so eating the label’s whole 78 g puts you at the ceiling.

Low fat or high fat for weight

For weight, they come out about even. In DIETFITS, 609 adults ate either a healthy low-fat diet or a healthy low-carb diet for a year. The low-fat group ended up eating 29% of their calories as fat and the low-carb group 45%. They lost about the same weight, about 12 and 13 pounds (5.3 and 6.0 kg), and the gap was too small to count. Fat has 9 calories a gram, so portions decide the weight. bodyfat.guide has the rest of that argument.

The floor

There are two fats your body can’t make, so you have to eat them, and both are polyunsaturated. The US Adequate Intakes are about 12 g a day of linoleic acid (omega-6) for women and 17 g for men up to age 50, and 1.1 g a day of alpha-linolenic acid (plant omega-3) for women and 1.6 g for men.

A tablespoon of corn oil has 8.0 g of polyunsaturated fat. A tablespoon of canola oil has 2.6 g of linoleic acid and 1.3 g of alpha-linolenic acid, more than a woman’s whole day of the second one. A very low fat day built without oils, nuts or seeds can come up short on both.