According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 16 percent of U.S. adults have high blood cholesterol levels. Your saturated fat intake significantly affects your blood cholesterol and therefore heart disease risk. Low-cholesterol diets are typically used for people with high blood cholesterol levels; therefore, cholesterol-lowering diets typically limit saturated fat intake to a greater extent than other healthy eating plans.
Sources
To effectively limit your saturated fat intake, it's important to become familiar with the main dietary sources of saturated fats. Most saturated fat comes from high-fat animal-based foods such as cheese, bacon and other high-fat meats, butter, cream, lard and whole milk. Plant-based food sources of saturated fat include coconut and palm oils. Animal-based foods high in saturated fat are usually high in dietary cholesterol as well.
General Recommendations
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 encourages people to limit saturated fat intake to less than 10 percent of daily calories, and dietary cholesterol to less than 300 mg per day, to help reduce disease risks. For example, if you currently consume a 2,000-calorie diet, your saturated fat intake should be less than 22.2 g per day.
TLC and DASH Diets
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes diet is used to help lower blood cholesterol levels. The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet is commonly used to help reduce high blood pressure. Both diets limited saturated fat and dietary cholesterol more than the general recommendations of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. The TLC diet encourages a reduction of saturated fat to less than 7 percent of your daily calories and limiting dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg per day. Similarly, the DASH diet consists of only 6 percent of daily calories from saturated fat and 150 mg of dietary cholesterol each day. If you currently consume a 2,000-calorie diet, 6 percent of your calories from saturated fats would equal 13.3 saturated fat grams per day.
Fat Gram Calculations
If you know how many calories you consume each day, you can easily calculate your daily allowance of saturated fats when following a low-cholesterol diet. First, multiply your total calorie consumption by 0.06, or 6 percent, to determine your daily calorie allowance from saturated fats. Then, since fat provides 9 calories per gram, divide your result by 9 to determine your daily saturated fat allowance in grams.
