Q. Please help me with a math problem. I don’t know how to figure out how much fat I can safely eat each day. I want to stay inside of some of the guidelines I have read about, but though they keep saying limit your fat to 30 percent of the daily intake, I can’t translate that into something I can use in selecting my diet. Can you help me?
A. To start with, you must include all your dietary fats in the calculation. That takes in saturated fat (lard, butter, cheese and other fats that are hard at room temperature), polyunsaturated fats (soft or liquid at room temperature; this classification includes vegetable oils such as corn, soybean and safflower), monounsaturated fats (liquids that include olive, Canola and peanut oils) and hydrogenated fats. Hydrogenation changes mono- and polyunsaturated fats to hard fats, and also removes their healthy advantage.
Keep unsaturated fats to a minimum, polyunsaturated to no more than 10 percent of daily calories, and rely as much as possible on monounsaturated fats for the fats in your diet. In general a low-fat diet for an average, active woman could include 45-55 grams of fat per day; active men can go as high as 50-60 grams a day.
To calculate your personal amount, you must start with your anticipated daily caloric intake. Let’s use 2,000 calories as an example. Multiply that by 30 percent (.30), which gives you 600, then divide 600 by nine (there are nine calories to each gram of fat), giving you a total of 66.6 grams.
You might wish to reduce your fat intake to 25 percent, reducing the amount to 56 grams a day, more than enough for most diet menus and for safe levels of fat in your food.
Q. My 10-year-old grandson is reported to have high blood pressure. Is this like hypertension in adults, and can it be treated? We didn’t think this occurred in children, so maybe the doctor is wrong.
A. Hypertension can occur in children. When it does, the cases generally are mild; they are frequently found in families with histories of hypertension and excess body weight.
Treatment usually begins with the physician taking the child’s medical history, giving a thorough physical examination and uncovering information in the family’s medical history. Such information enables the doctor to determine if the youngster really suffers from hypertension, or from some other disorder that causes the blood pressure to rise (secondary hypertension). This is much more common in children than in adults.
Secondary hypertension is caused by, or associated with, a variety of diseases, such as disorders of the kidney, central nervous system, endocrine gland or vascular system. When such secondary diseases are cured, the child’s high blood pressure usually returns to normal.
Because of today’s readily available blood pressure measurements, mild hypertension is being discovered in children on a much more frequent basis than was previously thought to occur. When doctors treat it, their goal is to reduce blood pressure without producing side effects that could interfere with the youngster’s normal growth and development.
Mild, or borderline, blood pressure is usually treated by diet modification for weight control and an exercise program. The child’s physician may prescribe anti-hypertensive drugs to prevent possible damage to blood vessels and/or other organs. Frequently, very small dosages are given and, if necessary, slowly increased.
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