Fresh and crunchy salads provide important vitamins and minerals. A few servings of the wrong dressing can quickly turn your salad into a real calorie bomb for a healthy and balanced diet.
Healthy eating could be so easy if there weren’t secret fatteners around every corner. Real calorie traps are often hidden behind inconspicuous and harmless-looking foods, which can quickly destroy successful dieting. It’s often the little things like salad dressings that smuggle unwanted calories and added sugar through the back door onto our plates. If you’re trying to eat healthily or lose weight, be careful what you’re pouring onto your delicious and healthy salads.
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These 5 salad dressings are real fatteners
Thousand Island Dressing
Creamy, piquant and delicately spicy: The Thousand Island Dressing is one of the most popular salad dressings and is also used as a sandwich or hamburger sauce in its country of origin, the USA. Even the fast-food veteran McDonalds spices up its burgers with its own version of the Thousand Island dressing, which is of course formulated top secret. Unfortunately, the orange-red salad dressing also has a lot to offer: Many of the commercially available ready-made dressings have around 300 calories per 100 milliliters and are real calorie traps with up to 10 grams of sugar. If you want to eat healthily, you should better avoid ready-made sauces like Thousand Island Dressing.
Caesar Dressing
The Italian-inspired creamy-herbal Caesar dressing is a true classic among salad dressings. But if you give a courageous swing of the so light and innocent-looking long-running dressing over an actually healthy and low-calorie salad, you sometimes break your iron weight loss goals. Customary ready-made dressings from the large domestic sauce manufacturers often have more than 200 calories per 100 milliliters . Even a look at the nutritional value tables does not make the balance any better, as many manufacturers sweeten their Caesar dressings with glucose-fructose syrup. This is the usual German name for corn syrup, which is used as a cheap industrial sweetener and has a much higher sweetening power than normal sugar.
Read here which foods besides corn syrup are even more dangerous than sugar >>
Oil and vinegar dressing
What initially sounds calorically harmless is unfortunately a sly old dog. Oil and vinegar dressings from the supermarket are real calorie bombs and have thwarted many diets. The makers of ready-to-eat dressings based on oil and vinegar very often add indecent amounts of sugar to their innocent-looking salad dressings. Commercially available dressings with white wine vinegar and rapeseed oil often have 300 calories per 100 milliliters. Of the carbohydrates found in supermarket dressings, most come from added sugars, often exceeding 15 grams per 100 milliliters. Better to rely on your own kitchen skills and simply prepare the vinegar and oil dressing yourself. Use good oil, fresh vinegar and refine your vinaigrette with fresh herbs as you like.
Salad dressing with blue cheese
If you like it particularly strong and aromatic, you will certainly fancy a hearty and spicy blue cheese dressing. Noble Roquefort is usually used for this salad dressing. The strict French cheese packs quite a punch when it comes to calories. Cream or mayonnaise is also added to most blue cheese dressings. Add more than 250 calories per serving to your salad with these dressings . If you want to keep a slim figure, you should avoid Roquefort and Co.
Tip: If you want to eat healthier and be more calorie-conscious, you should also take a close look at the drinks you drink every day. Many hidden calories secretly sneak into our diet via juices, smoothies and milk drinks.
Find out here which drinks have a surprising number of calories >>
French Dressing
It’s such a thing with French dressing. If you order salads with French dressing in good restaurants, you usually get a delicious and relatively low-calorie handmade vinaigrette made of oil, vinegar and a pinch of spices. However, many manufacturers of supermarket dressings interpret French dressing in their own way. The supermarket versions contain added sugar, cream, mayonnaise and other fattening ingredients. Depending on the manufacturer and preparation, French dressings can have up to 400 calories per 100 milliliters.
