Tracked as a cap
Saturated fat tracking
- Unit
- g
- Default cap
- 22 g
- Direction
- Stay under
What it is, and why people track it
Saturated fat is the fat most consistently named in guidance on cardiovascular risk, and the one most guidance asks people to limit rather than hit.
Keeping it separate from total fat is the point. A single “fat” number cannot tell you whether you ate salmon and olive oil or butter and processed meat.
Setting your number
AIM caps saturated fat at 22 g a day, about 10% of a 2,000 kcal day, which matches the ceiling used on nutrition labels. Some guidance goes lower, to roughly 7%, for people managing cardiovascular risk.
How good is the estimate?
Depends on identifying the cooking fat, which is the same blind spot total fat has. Say what it was cooked in and this number improves sharply.
Questions
- How much saturated fat per day?
- Nutrition labels use a 20 g daily value, and guidance commonly caps it at about 10% of energy intake — roughly 22 g on a 2,000 kcal day. AIM defaults to 22 g as a cap.
Also in this group
Protein
Protein is the metric most people open a tracker for. AIM estimates it per ingredient rather than per meal, so a swap of chicken for tofu shows up where it happened.
Carbs
Carbohydrate, broken out per ingredient, with fiber and sugar tracked separately so “carbs” does not have to mean three different things at once.
Fat
Total fat per meal, with saturated fat tracked separately as a cap — because they are two different questions and one number cannot answer both.
Fiber
Fiber is the nutrient most people are short on and least likely to have a field for. In AIM it is a standard metric with its own goal and its own color on every chart.
Track saturated fat without a database search
AIM estimates it on every meal from a photo or a sentence, and lets you correct anything it got wrong just by saying so.