Many diets restrict your level of fat intake to a particular percentage of your total caloric intake. You can calculate the percentage of calories that come from fat by using the amount of fat and the total number of calories in the food item. Nutritional labels frequently provide this information for brand name foods and nutritional databases provide information on generic foods that may not have nutritional labels.
Step 1
Obtain the total number of calories in a serving of food. This information is typically included on the nutritional label. You can also determine the number of calories in food with a nutrition database like the United States Department of Agriculture's Nutrient Data Laboratory.
Assume for this example that the serving of food contains 211 calories.
Step 2
Determine the number of grams of fat that a serving of the food contains. This information may also be included on the nutritional label.
Let the fact content in a serving of the food be 7g for this example.
Step 3
Compute the fat calories for a serving of the food by multiplying the grams of fat in the food by nine. This calculation reflects the fact that each gram of fat provides 9 calories.
The serving of food in this example contains 7g of fat, so each serving contains 7 --- 9 = 63 calories from fat.
Step 4
Calculate the percentage of calories that come from fat in a serving of the food. The following equation provides this calculation: Fat Percentage = (Fat Calories / Total Calories) --- 100.
The serving of food in this example contains 63 calories from fat and 211 total calories. The percentage of calories that come from fat in this food is (63 / 211) --- 100 = 29.9 percent.
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