Many people believe that the lowly salad is the ideal diet food. In fact, many people believe that any salad is a healthy salad. As your local contrarian, and person who believes in telling the nutritional truth, here is the skinny on the high fat salad!
3 1/2 cups of lettuce contains about 15 calories. Now this is a lot of lettuce; in fact, it's quite a bowlful! Add some shredded carrot and red cabbage, some sliced green onion, a few cubes of orange and red bell pepper, and some cucumber slices, and you have a full meal.
What's missing here? Oh yes, the salad dressing. Have you ever measured a tablespoon of dressing? Probably not. Have you ever measured how much salad dressing you actually use? Probably not!
In my hand, I'm holding a bottle of Kraft Rancher's Choice Salad Dressing. A look at the label reveals that 1 tablespoon of dressing has 80 calories. Now go measure 1 tbsp of dressing...not much in there, huh?
Most people use salad dressing by the "pour method"...I would wager a bet that most people, for a 3 1/2 cup salad would use almost 1/4 cup of dressing (if you're not sure, go get a measuring cup and see for yourself)...
1/4 c = 4 tbsp. = 4 X 80 = 320 calories in your dressing
Now your 15+ calorie salad, is a 335 calorie salad.
Let's dig a little deeper...back to our salad dressing. Within each of those 80 calories, 72 of them are from fat, a whopping 90%. We multiply that by 4 tbsp = 288 total fat calories, and your meal calculates out at about 85% fat.
And did you now want to add some croutons (high fat)? Let's not go there...
I can hear you jumping up and down and yelling..."Who eats salad without salad dressing? Well, my friend, if you want to enjoy all the benefits of your salad, without all the health-destroying fat calories, never mind the highly processed mystery ingredients in a commercially prepared salad dressing, you might just want to start experimenting!
You might be surprised to discover how delicious real vegetables actually are! Go give it a try!
