How Much Fat Do You Consume? Go Figure

Dear Eating Right: As if things weren’t confusing enough, now manufacturers are plastering “98% fat free” on the labels of some of my favorite foods. What does that mean? What is the real fat content? I’m trying to keep my diet down to 30% fat; is there some easy way to figure out how to do it?

--PAULA

Dear Paula: It’s all pretty confusing. In some instances, “light” or “lite” refers to color or taste. Other times, a “98% fat-free” claim is a “by weight” measurement. (Since fat is light, it weighs less than other components of a food, but that doesn’t mean the product contains less fat.)

Many manufacturers have responded to complaints such as yours by including a nutrition-information-per-serving label on the package, which gives the exact grams of fat per serving. But since you need to know how much fat you’re eating in your total diet, it’s worth learning how to figure it out. It’s not that complicated; dietitians were using the formula long before computers were taught to evaluate the foods we eat.

Here’s how it works: Each gram of fat equals nine calories (it takes nine energy calories to burn up each gram of fat in your body). If you multiply the number of grams of fat by nine then divide by the total number of calories in the food, you’ll get the true percentage of fat calories the food contains.

Before calculating, be sure that the serving size given is reasonable; in high-fat foods, the serving size listed is often considerably smaller than what you actually eat.

Consider ice cream. Ordinary vanilla is labeled as 100 calories and five grams of fat for a three-ounce serving. But the average person eats at least a cup of ice cream; eat that much and the numbers jump to 270 calories and 14 grams of fat. Make it super-premium ice cream and you’ve eaten a whopping 350 calories and 24 grams of fat.

But let’s say you are limiting yourself to a three-ounce serving: You’ll multiply the five grams of fat by nine and discover that the ice cream has 45 calories from fat. Divide 45 by the number of total calories, 100, and you discover that regular vanilla ice cream is 45% fat--nearly half. Since the health organizations recommend that fat intake be limited to 30%, you would need to cut back on high-fat foods the rest of the day to compensate for the ice cream.

You can use this system to figure out the percentage of fat in your entire daily diet. Multiply the total number of grams of fat you eat each day by 9, then divide by the total number of calories you had the whole day. The resulting number is the percentage of fat in your diet. If this system seems like too much work, look up your general calorie intake on the accompanying chart, and it will tell you how many grams of fat you should be eating for a 30% fat diet.

But there’s an easier way: At least two local companies have devised percent-of-fat calculators. You’ll still have to read the labels if you use these guides, but they do the math. Simply locate the grams of fat under the total number of calories and the window tells you the percentage of fat in the product.

To order the 4 1/2-inch-diameter Fat Finder Calculator, send $3.95 plus $1.50 for postage and handling to: VitaAerobics Inc., 41-905 Boardwalk, Suite B, Palm Desert, Calif., 92260. With an accompanying nutrition booklet, which gives label reading and cooking tips and information about hydrogenation, calories, saturated fat and cholesterol, the price is $5.95 plus postage. VitaAerobics will take telephone requests for orders of more than $10. Call (800) 323-8042.

The Percent-O-Fat Calculator, which is slightly smaller, is available in health food stores for $6.95.

Daily Fat Consumption Guide

Calorie Intake

1,200

1,500

2,000

2,500

3,000

30% Fat in Grams

40

50

67

83

100