The short answer#
About 10% of your daily energy. On a 2000 kcal day that is around 22 g; on 1500 kcal it is about 17 g; on 2800 kcal it is about 31 g.
It is a percentage rather than a fixed number because the same grams mean a different thing to a small person eating 1400 kcal and a large one eating 3000. Guidance in the UK is expressed as a gram cap by sex — around 30 g for men and 20 g for women — which is the same idea rounded for a leaflet.
Where the 10% comes from#
Both the World Health Organization and the US Dietary Guidelines put the ceiling at a tenth of total energy. Some bodies go lower for people already being treated for high cholesterol; that is a clinical decision and not something an app should be making for you.
The arithmetic to get from a percentage to grams is one step, because fat carries 9 kcal per gram:
grams = (budget × 0.10) ÷ 9
So 2000 kcal → 200 kcal from saturated fat → about 22 g.
SmartCrunch computes exactly this, from the same calorie target it shows on the main screen, so the limit moves when your budget moves. The nutrient target calculator does it for any budget you type in.
What 22 g looks like#
Rough, and worth knowing before you start weighing things:
| Food | Portion | Saturated fat |
|---|---|---|
| Butter | 10 g (one thin spread) | ~5 g |
| Cheddar | 30 g (a small matchbox) | ~6 g |
| Whole milk | 200 ml | ~4 g |
| Streaky bacon | 2 rashers | ~5 g |
| Croissant | one | ~7 g |
| Coconut oil | 1 tbsp | ~12 g |
| Olive oil | 1 tbsp | ~2 g |
| Chicken breast, skinless | 150 g | ~1 g |
Two cheese sandwiches and a coffee with whole milk can reach the day’s ceiling before dinner, which is the practical reason the figure is worth tracking at all rather than estimating.
Why “saturated” and not just “fat”#
Total fat has largely fallen out of guidance as a thing to limit. The distinction that survived is between saturated fat and unsaturated fat, and the recommendation is about replacement rather than removal: swapping some saturated fat for unsaturated fat is the change associated with lower cardiovascular risk. Simply eating less fat and more refined carbohydrate is not the same intervention and does not produce the same result.
That is as far as this page goes. Anything about your own cholesterol, your own risk, or what you should do about either is a conversation with a clinician — this app counts things and is not a medical device.
Tracking it without guessing#
Saturated fat is mandatory on European and UK labels, so scanned products usually carry it. What they do not always carry is fibre or sodium, and a meal you typed in by hand carries none of the four.
SmartCrunch reports what it actually knows: each daily total comes with the number of entries it was computed from, and below half the day it declines to show a total rather than presenting a figure built from a third of your food. A saturated fat number that quietly ignores the two meals it has no data for is worse than no number, because it reads as a pass.
Read next
- How to read a food label The two mistakes that matter are reading a per-100 g figure as a portion, and reading a missing field as a zero. Everything else on a label is arithmetic.
- How much fibre per day? About 28 g on a 2000 kcal day, and 30 g on 2200. Tied to energy rather than fixed, because the same grams mean different things at different intakes.