10 reasons your salad dressing is making your healthy eating unhealthy
Regular commercial non-refrigerated salad dressings, dips (or more commonly known as SAUCEs) and marinades are often cramped with colors, preservatives, saturated fats, unnecessary calories and sodium. So when you eat more and more salads to reap the benefits of good health, you may be undoing the benefits by adding an unhealthy salad dressing to it. If you want to have salads in a tasty healthy way, it is important for you to know which ones to choose and which ones to avoid.
Let’s have a look at 10 reasons your salad dressings can void your quest for healthy eating:
- Most of the commercial salad dressings are made of soybean oil or canola oils which are less expensive and highly processed- source of unsaturated fats whereas consumers assume that the salad dressing only use extra virgin olive oils.
- Have you ever thought why so many salad dressings use water as a component? Water is not definitely toxic but it is the least expensive ingredient that increases the volume of the jar without adding much cost. & then to keep the taste intact, companies add flavors, colors and what not! So when we buy more, sometimes we actually buy less. We definitely need to check our definition for Value for money!
- Companies add lot of artificial colors to make the dressing look. Most common approved colors are yellow 5, yellow 6. In studies ranging from 1973 to 2004, one common finding on impact of artificial food colors has been that these artificial food dyes increase hyperactivity in majority of children. Though more research is required, it is always best to consume something without any artificial colors or to put it in this way that we need to learn to love food in their natural color.
- With added water, companies need to add artificial flavors, Stabilizers, gums, thickeners, and emulsifiers to offset the added water. And in the case of fat-free or low-fat dressings, even more emulsifiers are used to replace the mouth-feel of the oils. While these additives have historically been thought to be fairly innocuous, new research is calling into question what this class of additives may be doing to the gut health in our intestinal tract.
- Now that you have added artificial flavors to the dressings, you need to protect it too. And then to protect the flavors, factories add calcium disodium EDTA. As fortunately our digestive tract cannot consume more than 5% of calcium disodium EDTA, the side effects has been nominal whereas an overdose can cause digestive distress (according to Healthline.com)
- Most of the salad dressings are high in sodium. If you are eating more dressing than required (recommended dose is 25-30 gram per bowl of salad), the extra sodium can build in your body. E.g. a popular brand for salad dressings Wish Bone’s Fat-Free Italian dressing has 170mg in one tablespoons. If you go for a healthy version you can keep it within 25mg. But commercially produced ones cant. Why? Lots of water, processed oils, other shelf stable ingredients need lots of salt to deliver more flavor. So we need to be careful.
- According to Insider.com, ‘titanium dioxide is a food additive that can be found in a variety of foodstuffs, like ranch dressing, coffee creamer, icing, and powdered sugar. It is often used to make whites appear whiter. However, for this same reason, it can also be found in items like paint, sunscreen, and laundry detergent.’ So next time you eat your ranch dressing, don’t forget to read the labels to find the hidden name of titanium dioxide.
- Sugar makes everything taste better – and the cheapest would be the refined white sugar that is loaded with harmful calories. The sugar-free ones are harmful too (or perhaps more harmful) as they are loaded with artificial sweeteners which do more harm than good.
- Preservatives are a must in commercial dressings as producers want to achieve a shelf life of 12-24 months without keeping them in the refrigerator. While there’s some debate over the safety of preservatives like sodium benzoate and calcium disodium EDTA, a preservative less salad dressing is always the best.
- Except for organic or Non-GMO certified products, most salad dressings contain GMOs (genetically modified organism). E.g. Ingredients like soybean oil, canola, sugar, high fructose syrup, maltodextrin, modified cornstarch, xanthan gum etc are usually made from GMO crop.
