Cholesterol is a fatty substance carried in your blood, and the NHS says high cholesterol does not usually cause symptoms, so you can only find out you have it from a blood test. The same page says you can lower it by eating healthily and getting more exercise. This post sticks to the food side, and in particular to the label on the back of the packet.
Start with the fat line, not the sugar line
The NHS advice on how to lower your cholesterol begins with fat: cut down on fatty food, especially food high in saturated fat, while still eating foods that contain unsaturated fat. It also tells you to check food labels to see what type of fat a product has in it.
The NHS page Fat: the facts explains why. Eating too much saturated fat can raise "bad" LDL cholesterol in your blood. It adds that there is good evidence that replacing saturated fats with some unsaturated fats can help to lower your cholesterol level.
The numbers that count as high or low
The NHS guide to food labels gives cut-offs per 100 g:
- saturated fat: high is more than 5 g, low is 1.5 g or less
- total fat: high is more than 17.5 g, low is 3 g or less
- sugars: high is more than 22.5 g, low is 5 g or less
The NHS uses saturated fat as its own example. If you are trying to cut down on it, eat fewer foods that have more than 5 g of saturated fat per 100 g. The ingredients list helps too. Ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, so if cream, butter or oil comes first, the food is likely to be high in fat.
A plain date measured against those cut-offs
The USDA FoodData Central record for Deglet Noor dates lists 0.032 g of saturated fat, 0.39 g of total fat and 0 mg of cholesterol per 100 g. Both fat figures sit well inside the NHS "low" band. The sugar figure goes the other way: 63.4 g per 100 g for Deglet Noor and 66.5 g for Medjool dates, which is high by the NHS cut-off. So a date passes the fat check and fails the sugar check, and the honest reading of the label has to say both.
The fibre line is worth a look as well. Deglet Noor has 8.0 g of fibre per 100 g and Medjool 6.7 g. The NHS labels page says most people in the UK do not eat enough fruit, vegetables, oily fish or fibre.
What studies found when people ate dates
A label tells you what is in a food. It cannot tell you what eating it does to your blood, and for that you need trials.
In a pilot study by Rock and colleagues (2009), ten healthy people ate 100 g a day of Medjool or Hallawi dates for four weeks. There was no significant change in their total cholesterol or in the cholesterol in their VLDL, LDL or HDL fractions. Serum triglycerides fell by 8% after Medjool and by 15% after Hallawi dates.
A randomised trial by Butler and colleagues (2022) compared 60 g of dates a day with 60 g of raisins a day for 12 weeks in 79 adults with type 2 diabetes. Sixty-one finished. Blood lipids showed no difference between or within the two groups.
A meta-analysis by Mirghani and Alhowiti (2025) pooled fourteen cohorts from four randomised studies, 298 participants in all, every one of them with type 2 diabetes. Total cholesterol went down in the pooled result, with heterogeneity of 90%. LDL cholesterol, triglycerides and HDL cholesterol showed no significant change, and the authors call for larger studies.
That is a small body of evidence. It does not show that dates lower cholesterol in healthy people, and the one study of healthy adults found no change. None of the three found that dates made blood lipids worse.
Using the label to make a swap
On the NHS list of foods to eat less of are cakes and biscuits, butter, lard and ghee, cream and cheese, fatty meat, and food containing coconut oil or palm oil. Fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds are on the list to eat more of. Reading two lines, saturated fat and sugar, is enough to see which side of that list a snack falls on.
For dried fruit, the NHS 5 A Day guidance sets the portion: a 30 g portion of dried fruit such as dates counts as one of your 5 A Day, eaten at mealtimes rather than as a snack between meals, to reduce the impact on teeth. If you are restocking, look at the dates fruit range and current harga kurma, and check the label on any stuffed or coated dates, since the figures above are for the plain fruit.
Food is only one part of the NHS advice. It also lists at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous activity a week, stopping smoking, and not regularly drinking more than 14 units of alcohol a week. Some people also need medicine.
This article is general information, not medical advice. If you have high cholesterol or take medicine for it, speak to your doctor before changing your diet.
References
- Rock W, et al. Effects of date (Phoenix dactylifera L., Medjool or Hallawi variety) consumption by healthy subjects on serum glucose and lipid levels and on serum oxidative status: a pilot study. J Agric Food Chem. 2009;57(17):8010-7. PMID 19681613
- Butler AE, et al. Effect of Date Fruit Consumption on the Glycemic Control of Patients with Type 2 Diabetes: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Nutrients. 2022;14(17):3491. PMID 36079749
- Mirghani HO, Alhowiti A. Dates fruit effects on dyslipidemia among patients with Type-2 diabetes mellitus: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials. Pak J Med Sci. 2025;41(1):331-337. PMID 39867809
- NHS. High cholesterol; How to lower your cholesterol; Fat: the facts; Food labels; 5 A Day: what counts?
- USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy (2019): Dates, deglet noor, FDC ID 171726; Dates, medjool, FDC ID 168191.