How Much Grams of Fat Per Day Can You Have When You’re a Diabetic?

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Diabetes is an ailment wherein your blood sugar or blood glucose are at high levels. You can get glucose from the food that you eat. Then, insulin transports glucose into your cells to give you energy. But when you have type 1 diabetes, your body automatically will not develop insulin.

Meanwhile, if you have type 2 diabetes, the body will not use or even develop insulin. When this happens, the glucose will stay in your body, resulting in prediabetes. In the event that you already have diabetes, you can end up damaging your nerves, kidneys, and eyes. Some even have a stroke and heart disease.

Fat and Diabetes

Although there are good fats and bad fats, when there is too much fat in your body, it can ruin your overall health. How? Fat can increase your weight and give you diabetes. In some cases, you can even end up having cardiovascular diseases.

When you have too much fat intake, it can slow down your digestion. During this time, your body will have a hard time developing insulin in which you can have high blood glucose. Fat can increase your cholesterol levels, increasing your tendency of having a stroke and heart attack.

Right now, you must be thinking, should you avoid fat? The answer is no. Instead, what you can do is to lessen your fat intake, particularly trans fat and saturated fat. Fat is important in your body. It can give your body energy, transport fat-soluble vitamins such as vitamin K, vitamin E, and vitamin D, and provide your body with a protective layer to keep your vital organs protected.

Since fat cannot and should not be entirely avoided, you can limit your fat intake. You can do this by checking the nutrition label of the product before you buy it. You can also focus on drinking skimmed milk or any low-fat dairy products. Eating lean cuts of meat is good too.

The question now is: how many grams of fat should you have per day? The answer is at least 20 grams, especially when you are planning to eat saturated fat.

Types of Fats

Since we mentioned that there are types of fats, you need to be aware of each one so you know which to avoid. Here are the 3 types of fat:


This type of fat has different uses for your body. In fact, your liver can produce cholesterol. So in order to control the cholesterol level in your body, you need to monitor the food that you eat. Maintain at least 200 milligrams of cholesterol every day. Doing this can lower your tendency to have diabetes.

Omega-3 fatty acids, polyunsaturated fat, and monounsaturated fat

These are considered as good fat that can lower your risk of having arterial blockages and protect your bloodstream of LDL cholesterol.

Trans fat and saturated fat

Take note that these are known as bad fats as they can increase your LDL cholesterol. They can also make your heart experience difficulty when pumping blood.

Your Fat Intake

Earlier, we mentioned that you need to limit your fat intake. This means that you should keep all your fat intake in small qualities, even for good fats. For you to remember easily, you need to have a fat intake that is twice as much as calories, protein, or carbohydrates that you eat. This way, you can balance the amount of these in your body to still carry out essential body functions.

Another tip that you can do are the following:

  • Saturated fats are dairy products, palm oil, coconut, the skin of the chicken, and other poultry. The ideal intake of this kind of fat should be 15 grams.
  • Trans fat is usually found in processed foods and hydrogenated oils. Since these are not good for the body, you need to avoid these as much as possible.

Since you are not allowed to eat trans fat, you can eat these as an alternative:

  • Avocado
  • Nuts
  • Seeds
  • Olive oil
  • Peanut butter
  • Canola oil
  • Soybean oil
  • Safflower
  • Cottonseed
  • Corn
  • Flaxseeds
  • Walnuts
  • Soybean products
  • Fish

You can also track fat grams if you want to be sure. The first thing that you need to do is remember the required total fat and saturated fat amount. For total fat, you need to keep it between 20% and 35% daily, while saturated fat should be 10% or less.

Next, you compute the ideal amount of calories that you should take by the number of calories that you ate. Then divide by 9 as this is the number of calories in one gram of fat.

For a simpler way to compute the amount of fat that you had for the day, you can just add the fat grams based on the nutrition label of the food that you just ate. This strategy will be difficult if you do not have the data of the fat gram of a certain food.


Diabetes is a condition that can lead to other life-threatening diseases. This is why as much as possible, people do their best to prevent this ailment. One of the factors that can increase your chance of having diabetes is fat. As you probably know, having too much fat in your body is not good for the body. It can result in a number of ailments too, including obesity.

The best way to lower your risk of having diabetes then is to watch your fat intake. How? Look out for the different types of fat, avoid trans fat, and monitor your fat intake. Limiting your fat intake is good too. This can be done by looking at the nutritional level before buying or eating a certain product and knowing which foods have too much fat. And if you are wondering how many grams of fat you can take, the answer is 20 grams.

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