Most health advice focuses on lowering triglycerides, so if you’re trying to raise yours, you’re dealing with a less common situation. Triglyceride levels below 150 mg/dL are considered healthy, and levels that are genuinely too low are rare. But certain medical conditions, medications, and dietary patterns can push triglycerides unusually low, and understanding what drives triglyceride production in your body is the key to bringing them back up safely.
What Counts as Too Low
Standard lab references classify anything under 150 mg/dL as healthy, without a formal lower cutoff. There’s no widely agreed-upon number for “too low,” which is why most lab reports won’t flag a low result the way they would a high one. That said, consistently very low readings, particularly below 35 to 50 mg/dL, can signal an underlying issue worth investigating.
Why Your Triglycerides Might Be Low
The most common non-genetic causes of low triglycerides are malnutrition, an overactive thyroid (hyperthyroidism), and certain medications. If you’re on a statin or another lipid-lowering drug, a high dose can push triglycerides down further than intended. Extremely low-fat or very low-calorie diets can also leave your body without enough raw material to produce triglycerides at normal rates.
A smaller number of people have genetic conditions that keep triglycerides chronically low. Abetalipoproteinemia, for example, is a rare inherited disorder that results in triglyceride and cholesterol levels under 30 mg/dL because the body can’t properly assemble the particles that transport fat through the blood. Familial hypobetalipoproteinemia and familial combined hypolipidemia are related conditions with varying degrees of severity. If your levels have always been extremely low regardless of diet, a genetic cause is worth discussing with your doctor.
How Your Body Makes Triglycerides
Your liver is the main triglyceride factory. When you eat carbohydrates or fats, your liver converts excess energy into triglycerides and packages them into particles that travel through your bloodstream. The process starts with breaking down sugars into a molecule called acetyl-CoA, which is then built up step by step into fatty acids and eventually assembled into triglycerides.
Fructose, the sugar found in fruit, honey, and many sweetened foods, is particularly efficient at driving this process. Unlike glucose, which is tightly regulated at multiple checkpoints during metabolism, fructose bypasses the main rate-limiting step in the liver and feeds relatively freely into triglyceride production. This is why high-fructose diets are so strongly linked to elevated triglyceride levels, and why adding fructose-containing foods is one of the more effective dietary levers if your goal is to raise them.
Dietary Changes That Raise Triglycerides
If you need to increase your triglyceride levels, the most direct approach is adjusting what you eat. Several dietary factors reliably push triglycerides upward:
- Refined carbohydrates and added sugars. White bread, pasta, rice, sugary drinks, and sweets all stimulate triglyceride production in the liver. Clinical trials have confirmed this directly: when overweight subjects replaced protein and unsaturated fats with refined starches and added sugars, their triglyceride levels rose significantly within three weeks.
- Higher calorie intake overall. Hypercaloric diets, meaning eating more calories than you burn, consistently raise triglycerides because the liver converts surplus energy into fat for storage.
- Saturated fat. Foods high in saturated fat, such as butter, cheese, red meat, and coconut oil, contribute to higher triglyceride levels. Combining high saturated fat intake with refined carbohydrates amplifies the effect.
- Fructose-rich foods. Honey, dried fruit, fruit juice, and anything sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup are especially potent triggers because of how efficiently the liver converts fructose into triglycerides.
If you’ve been eating a very low-carb, low-fat, or calorie-restricted diet, simply adding more balanced meals with adequate carbohydrates and healthy fats may be enough to normalize your levels. You don’t necessarily need to load up on junk food. Increasing portions of whole grains, starchy vegetables, fruit, and cooking fats can raise triglycerides while still supporting overall health.
The Role of Alcohol
Alcohol is one of the more powerful short-term triggers of triglyceride production. It stimulates the liver to produce large triglyceride-rich particles and simultaneously slows the breakdown of existing triglyceride carriers in the blood. The combination means triglycerides rise quickly after drinking.
The effect is dose-dependent. Moderate drinking, roughly one to three glasses a day for men and one to two for women, has minimal impact on fasting triglyceride levels. But when alcohol is consumed alongside a fatty meal, the effect multiplies. In one experiment, eating 70 grams of fat alone raised triglycerides by about 70% over four to six hours. Adding 40 grams of alcohol (roughly three standard drinks) to the same meal raised them by 180%. Even a smaller amount of alcohol, around 30 grams consumed with dinner, increased post-meal triglycerides by about 15%, though levels returned to normal by the next morning.
If your triglycerides are low due to a medical condition or extreme dietary restriction, alcohol is not the right solution. But it’s worth knowing that alcohol consumption is a significant factor in triglyceride levels, especially if your doctor is trying to understand why your numbers changed.
Physical Activity and Triglyceride Clearance
Exercise lowers triglycerides by increasing the activity of an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase, which pulls triglycerides out of your bloodstream and into your muscles for fuel. The flip side is that being sedentary reduces this enzyme’s activity, which means triglycerides stay in your blood longer and levels rise.
If you’re very physically active, especially with endurance exercise, that could be contributing to unusually low triglyceride readings. Reducing exercise intensity or volume, or simply eating more to compensate for calories burned, may help bring levels up. This doesn’t mean you should stop exercising entirely. It means that if you’re running marathons on a low-calorie diet and your triglycerides are bottoming out, there’s a clear mechanism at work.
A Practical Approach
For most people with low triglycerides, the fix involves eating more, particularly more carbohydrates and fats. Start by making sure you’re eating enough total calories for your activity level. Add starchy foods, fruits, and cooking fats to meals you’re already eating. If you’ve been on a very restrictive diet, whether low-carb, low-fat, or calorie-limited, relaxing those restrictions is the most straightforward path.
If your triglycerides are extremely low (under 30 to 40 mg/dL), haven’t responded to dietary changes, or are accompanied by symptoms like fatty stools, difficulty absorbing nutrients, or unexplained weight loss, the cause may be genetic or related to another medical condition like hyperthyroidism. In those cases, a lipid panel alone won’t give you the full picture, and further testing can identify whether something more specific is going on.