You can lower your triglycerides through a combination of dietary changes, regular exercise, and weight loss. For most people, cutting back on sugar and refined carbohydrates produces the fastest results, sometimes within weeks. The specific strategies that work best depend on how elevated your levels are and what’s driving them up.
Know Your Triglyceride Levels
Triglycerides are the most common type of fat in your blood. Your body converts calories it doesn’t need right away into triglycerides, which get stored in fat cells and released later for energy. A simple blood test (usually part of a standard cholesterol panel) tells you where you stand:
- Healthy: below 150 mg/dL
- Borderline high: 150 to 199 mg/dL
- High: 200 to 499 mg/dL
- Very high: 500 mg/dL or above
Borderline levels are worth addressing with lifestyle changes alone. Levels above 200 mg/dL raise your risk of heart disease more significantly, and anything above 500 mg/dL can cause inflammation of the pancreas, which is a medical emergency.
Cut Back on Sugar and Refined Carbs
This is the single most impactful dietary change for most people with elevated triglycerides. Your liver is the key player here. When you eat more sugar or starch than your body needs for immediate energy, your liver converts those excess carbohydrates into fat, packages them as triglycerides, and sends them into your bloodstream.
Fructose is especially potent. The majority of fructose you consume goes straight to the liver, where it gets rapidly processed into raw material for fat production. Unlike glucose, which is regulated by multiple feedback mechanisms throughout your body, fructose metabolism in the liver is essentially unregulated. Your liver keeps converting it into fat regardless of whether you need it. Over time, regularly consuming high amounts of fructose actually ramps up the liver’s fat-making capacity, causing your triglyceride levels to climb higher and stay elevated.
The biggest sources of fructose in most diets aren’t fruit. They’re sugary drinks, candy, baked goods, and anything sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or table sugar (which is half fructose). Cutting out sweetened beverages alone can produce a noticeable drop in triglycerides within a few weeks. White bread, white rice, and other refined carbohydrates break down quickly and flood the liver with the same kind of excess fuel, so replacing them with whole grains, vegetables, and legumes helps too.
Lose Even a Small Amount of Weight
You don’t need to hit your ideal body weight to see results. Even modest weight loss has an outsized effect on triglycerides. In one study, participants who lost roughly 4% of their body weight over just two weeks reduced liver triglyceride stores by about 42%. For someone weighing 200 pounds, that’s losing around 8 to 9 pounds.
The reason the effect is so large is that excess body fat, particularly fat stored around and inside the liver, directly feeds the cycle of triglyceride production. As you lose weight, your liver has less raw material to package into triglycerides, and your body starts pulling stored triglycerides out of your bloodstream for energy. Reducing carbohydrate intake appears to be especially effective for targeting liver fat specifically, which makes it a two-for-one strategy: you reduce the dietary trigger and the stored fat at the same time.
Exercise Regularly
Physical activity lowers triglycerides by burning them directly for fuel and by changing how your liver processes fat. High-intensity interval training has some of the strongest evidence. In one study, participants who ran three sessions per week, alternating between moderate and vigorous four-minute intervals for 32 minutes total, reduced their fasting triglycerides by about 28% after two months.
You don’t have to start with high-intensity work, though. Brisk walking, cycling, swimming, or any sustained aerobic activity helps. The key variables are consistency and total energy burned per session. Three to five sessions per week, at least 30 minutes each, is a reasonable target. The triglyceride-lowering effect of a single exercise session is temporary (it peaks about 24 to 48 hours afterward), which is why regular activity matters more than occasional hard workouts.
Increase Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Omega-3 fats, particularly EPA and DHA found in fatty fish, reduce the rate at which your liver produces triglycerides and speed up the rate at which triglycerides get cleared from your blood. Salmon, mackerel, sardines, herring, and anchovies are the richest food sources. Eating fatty fish two to three times per week is a solid baseline habit.
For people with clinically high triglycerides, dietary fish alone usually isn’t enough. The American Heart Association reviewed the evidence and concluded that doses below 2 grams per day of EPA plus DHA don’t meaningfully lower triglycerides. The effective therapeutic dose is about 4 grams per day (typically four capsules of a prescription-strength omega-3 product), which lowers triglycerides by 20% to 30% in people with levels between 200 and 499 mg/dL. In people with very high levels (500 mg/dL or above), reductions of 30% or more have been reported. These higher doses should be used under medical supervision, as they can interact with blood-thinning medications and affect other cholesterol markers.
Limit Alcohol
Alcohol is processed by the liver in much the same way as fructose, and it stimulates triglyceride production through many of the same pathways. Even moderate drinking can keep triglycerides elevated in people who are sensitive to it. If your levels are borderline or high, cutting alcohol entirely for a few weeks is one of the fastest ways to see whether it’s a major contributor for you. Some people see dramatic drops in triglycerides from this single change.
When Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough
If your triglycerides remain high after several months of consistent dietary and exercise changes, medication becomes part of the conversation. Statins, primarily prescribed for LDL cholesterol, also reduce triglycerides by up to 18% on average, and by as much as 43% in people with significantly elevated levels. For people whose triglycerides stay stubbornly high despite statin therapy, doctors may add a fibrate or prescription omega-3. Each of these options has a different risk-benefit profile, so the choice depends on your overall cardiovascular risk, other medications you’re taking, and how high your levels are.
Medication works best alongside the lifestyle changes described above, not as a replacement for them. The dietary and exercise strategies address the root causes of elevated triglycerides, while medication adds an extra layer of control when your body’s baseline production is too high to manage through behavior alone.