Posted on 07/05/2012 12:00:01 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
If you're using fat free dressing on your salad, you're doing it all wrong. According to scientists, you need to eat salad with fat-based dressings to get the most out of the veggies. Having no fat in your salad actually diminishes the benefit from eating vegetables.
This sounds a little crazy, right? But yes, even though fat free dressing has less calories than its fatty filled counterpart, you're not getting the full oomph you want when eating vegetables with skinny dressings. Researchers at Purdue University compared salad eating with dressing that had saturated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat at three, eight and twenty grams of fat to find which was most effective and discovered that fat is a good thing. The Atlantic says:
Mario Ferruzzi, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of food science at Purdue, said that in order to get more from eating fruits and vegetables, they need to be paired correctly with fat-based dressings.
It turned out that dressing made with monounsaturated fat (olive and canola oil) were easily the most effective, needing the least amount of dressing to get the most amount of health-promoting carotenoids (carotenoids act as antioxidants in our bodies). Carotenoids are found in eating plant foods like vegetables and fruits so it makes sense that we'd want to get as much bang as we can when eating them. Using salad dressing with fat accomplishes that. [Molecular Nutrition & Food Research via The Atlantic, Image Credit: Kamila i Wojtek Cyganek/Shutterstock]
Aside from nutrient deficiencies and energy loss, eating too little fat is an easy way to guarantee that you will frequently feel hungry. Fat satiates the appetite. Fat is an essential part of a healthy diet, and healthy fats are good for you.
Eat a balanced diet, control snacking and exercise daily is a recipe that will work for the vast majority of overweight people.
When a product says “fat-free” on the label, you can almost always assume that there’s more sugar and/or corn syrup in it, to make up for the lack of fat. I never buy anything labeled “fat-free”.
Congratulations on your weight loss/control success!! That is an amazing story.
My favorite for salad dressing is either Dorothy Lynch, or to mix some bleu cheese dressing with French dressing. YUM
Go Boilers!
While it may/may not be ideal, the human body can survive indefinitely without carbohydrates or fat.
I knew fat free dressings were wrong, LOL. Fat free ranch is unbelievably nasty....it’s sweet and gelatinous.
Rarestia, with all due respect, the four letter acronym you used at the beginning of your post makes me cringe. Do you know what it stands for? It’s awful.
GREEN SH*T IS WHAT FOOD EATS!
My ancestors survived the long walk from Olduvai Gorge to the present and did it without much GREEN SH*T and NO salad dressing at all.
Drizzle on a bit of olive oil or chop up some avocado and add it.
Fat and cholesterol are brain food.
Eggs are bad - No eggs are good.
Butter is bad - No butter is good.
Milk is bad - No milk is good.
One day in the not too distant future some scientist is going to say that tobacco is good, it is just the filter that was bad.
Olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, chopped up shallot, a bit of dijon and a squirt of honey, shake it up and I’m good to go.
3 or 4 teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil, 3 of balsamic vinegar, 1 of red wine vinegar and a small dash of sugar.
I agree with you. I'm damned sick of hearing about this crapola!
No the Roberts decision was the dumbest thing ever. Foods interact with each other. Absorption of certain vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients are dependent upon what they are consumed with.
Maybe but I would suggest that eating too many calories and not having enough expenditure of same in your daily life (ie the couch potatoes who play video games) is a the primary cause.
bake your own....alwaqqys tastes better anyway
Actually, not so dumb at all. The essential vitamins A, D, E and K are fat soluble, fat has to be present for the body to assimilate these nutrients.
Again, this is government interference in our life. By promoting a high carb-low fat diet since the 70’s we have more obesity, heart disease and diabetes than ever. Fat is NOT the problem. Actually it’s highly processed food, ie bread, grains, pastas and others.
Why do you think that all the diet programs that are carb restrictive work? Aside from weight loss, blood fats (ie cholesterol levels) return to normal, blood pressure returns to normal, blood sugars return to normal with these diets. What these diets do is balance the sugar and insulin levels in the body that when high, promote fat storage.
I remember in the 60’s on restaurant menus there was a entree called a “Diet Plate” on it was a hamburger, cottage cheese and fresh fruit. That’s what women ate when they wanted to maintain their weight, which was much slimmer then, and then comes the Surgeon General telling us NO, NO that’s BAAAD!
I do not listen to what the government recommends because you can guarantee it’s always wrong. Somebody is making money from promoting whatever it is.
Canola Oil? I grow Canolas in my backyard!
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