Salad Dressing

Salads are a great way to pack in nutrition and satisfy hunger, which people think is a great alternative to most foods that are bad for us. Sometimes, people don’t realize that salads can be horrible for you if they are not filed with the proper nutritious ingredients, like salad dressings. There are thick and creamy dressings like 1000 Island, Ranch, and Blue Cheese, which are filled with sodium and fats. Then there are the vinaigrette’s like balsamic, raspberry, and Italian, which have less fat, but still have a lot of sodium and sugar. To make their salad the healthiest it can possibly be, people tend to go with the vinaigrettes, and even though they may be reduced fat, fat free, or carb free, that doesn’t mean they are sugar free.

Some of the most popular vinaigrette’s are the fruity and sweet tasting ones. Naturally, vinegar tends to not be a sweet tasting product, but the vinaigrette’s that people are drowning their salads in taste sweet because they have added sugar. For example, lets take a look at Kraft fat free raspberry vinaigrette.

Kraft’s fat free raspberry vinaigrette is appealing to people due to the low calorie and fat content. They think that it’s a healthier decision to make to save calories, but it’s not always about the calories—people need to pay attention to what’s inside the food that they putting into their body. According to the Kraft website, their fat free raspberry vinaigrette has 9 grams of sugar per 3 tablespoon (1.5 oz.) serving. It’s easy to drown a salad in more than 3 tablespoons, which will automatically put the sugar content above 10grams, and to stay Sugar Savvy, that means only 24 grams in 24 hours, so at a minimum that would only leave 14 grams for the rest of the day.

As Voltage often teaches, sodium is sugar’s sidekick. In this example, the Kraft fat free raspberry vinaigrette has 320mg of sodium per a 3-tablespoon serving. If one puts 6 tablespoons of this salad dressing on their salad, they would be eating 18 grams of sugar and 640mg of sodium. That’s a vast amount of sodium and sugar for a topping on a meal that it supposed to be healthy and nutritious. Even though it’s easy to assume that a healthy decision is being made with vinaigrette’s such as the Kraft one, it’s really what’s inside the food that people need to be worried about. Make sure next time that you go for that healthy salad, you really know that it’s healthy by paying attention to what you’re putting on top of it because the dressing can ruin the nutritious content. Make sure you know where sugar is hiding from you.