“From today I am on a diet: only greens and kefir!”, “No, I will not spaghetti, I am losing weight. Let me have a salad, please.» These phrases were spoken or heard by each of us. Salad seems to us the embodiment of the ideals of healthy eating. Is it really so?
To begin with, lettuce, iceberg, romaine salads are about 95% water, and the content of useful components in them is negligible, says columnist Tamar Haspel (Tamar Haspel)1. For comparison, kale and arugula contain much less water — 85% — and more nutrients. Snacking on a plate of lettuce while on a strict diet sometimes seems like something people take for granted, but it’s actually more of a transport of water from your garden to your plate. A bunch of iceberg lettuce can generally be equated to a liter bottle of water. It will not give you either satiety or benefit, it will simply fill your stomach for a while, and you will want to eat in an hour. Dieting on one green salad is more of a hunger strike than a healthy diet. And all the kilograms dropped with it will very quickly return back, taking with them a couple of extra ones. What can we say that the result of such a diet can be dull skin, lifeless hair and brittle nails.
- Flowered salads
The second fact, which should not be forgotten, is that lettuce is different. A large plate of fresh vegetables with a handful of green, crunchy lettuce leaves and a dash of olive oil is the perfect snack and side dish, as any nutritionist will attest. But restaurant salads often overtake even burgers with french fries in terms of calories. For example, if you remove the leaves from the average «Caesar», then we get garlic croutons in oil, cheese, chicken and mayonnaise-based fatty sauce. Somehow it doesn’t fit with a healthy lifestyle, doesn’t it? This is the main catch of the salad — one of its appearance can inspire us that the dish will not harm our skin and figure. Meanwhile, hundreds of calories, fats and carbohydrates are hidden under green leaves.
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Do not blame the chefs and restaurateurs for this — they just cook what we want to eat. And we, for the most part, want something spicy, sweet, salty and preferably satisfying. This does not mean that healthy salads cannot be found in the restaurant, on the contrary, minimalist dishes made from lettuce, wheat germ and tofu are becoming more and more fashionable. Always study the composition of the dish you are about to eat, and also do not forget that you can always ask to remove some unwanted ingredient from your salad or change the dressing altogether.
But all this does not mean that you should completely abandon the green salad. On the contrary, the fresh taste of lettuce and iceberg will help you not to eat too much lasagna, spicy arugula perfectly sets off the delicate taste of shrimp, and kale chips are no worse than potato chips — only one hundred percent healthy and safe for the figure. Just don’t fall for the «lettuce diet» delusion, and remember that a good grilled steak with vegetables is much healthier than any salad in the same restaurant.
Read more about this. Tamar Haspel, a nutrition and health columnist for The Washington Post.