Have you ever noticed how many times people begin weight loss attempts by eating salads? How successful are they?

If you look over the calorie counts of the salads in most restaurants, you may be astonished at how many calories they really contain. The Apple-Walnut-Chicken salad at Applebee’s is 1160 calories. The Chicken Club salad from Arby’s is 810 calories. The Caesar salad with chicken at Chili’s is 1010 calories. Compare those to a quarter pounder from McDonald’s (410 calories) and you can see how easily people are fooled into ordering a tasty salad that contains a lot of calories, and a lot of fat.

The nutritional value of lettuce is low, in fact, almost nothing. The bulk and fiber value of lettuce is also low. So what is the problem with salads? The dressings in salads are the problem. Many salad dressings containing over 100 calories per tablespoon- and few people ever use a single tablespoon of dressing in their salad. Even the low-fat dressings contain a lot of calories.

More insidious are the emulsifiers used in salads that have been associated with metabolic syndrome in mice. Not that mice are people- but… The Food Additive That May Be Causing Obesity was a blog I wrote about this

We see this with our weight loss surgery patients. They eat a lot of salads, and once they give up their salads and begin to eat more cooked vegetables, they begin to lose weight. Vegetables contain more fiber, more nutrients, and when cooked, more nutrients are absorbed by the body then when consumed raw.

So if you are serious about weight loss increase your vegetables and give up the salads. Salads can be the enemy of your weight loss.

REFERENCES:
The references below come from our soon to be released cookbook, which includes a large reference section. Hope you find them helpful…

Salads are the enemy for patients wanting weight loss mainly because of the dressings used in the salads, and the high calorie count found in many of the salads. Most of my weight loss surgery patients will tell me, “I love salads,” – and what they love are less the vegetables, and more the use of vegetables as a vehicle to carry Ranch dressing. Check the average calorie count for salads in restaurants. But there is a good side to this. It appears that adding a bit of fat to the vegetables increases consumptions of carotenoids. By adding a minimal amount of fat, it makes these more “bioavailable” to eat.
J Nutr 2000
Pub Med ID 10702576

Carotenoids are responsible for the red, orange, and yellow colors of many vegetables. They have received a lot of attention in the scientific community because people with diets rich in carotenoids have less cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases (key again- a diet rich in them, not supplements ). When looking at food, if your plate has more color, it is probably healthier – and the more it looks just brown, the less healthy it is thought to be (we call this the eye spectrometer view of food). These carotenoids can only be absorbed with mixed with fat in the intestine.
Front Physiol 2012
Pub Med ID 22934067