Healthy Dressing For Taco SaladMaking Healthy, Low Carb Salad Dressing. A tasty salad dressing can really be a positive addition to a salad. Slurp I want to drink this dressing through a straw. Might be a little salty instead, maybe I can bathe in it All Im saying is, throw me into a tub of this. Some healthy foods can make you fat, because they are high in sugar, calories and fat. Serving size matters, so stop sabotaging your diet, and try our. This Fall Harvest Salad with Pumpkin Goddess Dressing celebrates the bounty of the season, and its a healthy Thanksgiving side dishIt not only adds flavor the oil can actually make some of the nutrients in the salad, particularly the fat soluble vitamins and phytochemicals, more accessible to your body. The problem is that there are quite a few pitfalls when looking for high quality salad dressings in the store. These fall into four categories serving size, added sugars, less than great oils, and other extra ingredients that can be problems. Serving Size. Salad dressing is one of those foods where we tend not to notice how much were putting on, and thus rounding error can enter in. For example, 1 grams of carbohydrate per serving is reported as one gram, which makes two servings three grams of carb. Also, if youre watching calories, they can add up fast. One tip for keeping serving size reasonable It turns out that it really only takes a small amount of an oil based dressing to coat the leaves of a salad. The trick is to put a small amount in a bowl and toss the salad very well. This not only uses less oil, it tastes better when the salad has an even coating of dressing instead of being poured on the top. Rockin-Ranch-Dressing.jpg' alt='Healthy Dressings To Buy' title='Healthy Dressings To Buy' />Added Sugars. Its quite surprising how much sugar and other carbohydrates can be added to salad dressings, so it pays to look at the label under Total Carbohydrate and also the ingredient list. Occasionally there might be a gram of fiber you can subtract from the total, but that is the exception. In general, reduced fat dressings have more sugar than regular dressings. For example, Girards Caesar salad dressing has 1 gram of carbohydrate per two tablespoon serving. The same brand has a light reduced fat Caesar dressing which has 5 grams of carbohydrate per serving, and a fat free variety which has 9 grams of carb per serving thats over a teaspoon of sugar for each tablespoon of dressingHealthy Dressing For Pasta SaladAnother example is Kraft Buttermilk Ranch Dressing which has 2 grams of carbohydrate per serving while the fat free version contains 1. First Place Prize for Most Sugar in a Salad Dressing Briannas Blush Wine Vinaigrette, at 1. Guidelines Try to find dressings that have zero or one gram of carbohydrate per two tablespoon serving, as well as no sugary ingredients, especially in the first four ingredients on the list. Note also that balsamic vinegar tends to have some sugar in it. Best Oils. The best oils for salads dressings have high amounts of monounsaturated fats and low amounts of omega 6 fats. Although omega 6 fat isnt at all a bad thing in and of itself, we tend to get too much in our diets. Of the easy to find and reasonably priced oils, olive oil is probably the best choice, at 7. Minced Meat Pie there. It also has other good for you nutrients. Canola oil has 5. Soybean oil, the least expensive and most commonly used oil, is 2. Again, a little is fine, but if you use a lot of salad dressing youll want to steer away from soy oil. When I was looking at labels, I saw a few called something like Olive Oil and Vinegar, but it turns out that while the first ingredient was olive oil, the second ingredient was soy andor canola oil. Newmans Own Olive Oil and Vinegar is an example of this. Also, look carefully for partially hydrogenated fat, which is almost entirely trans fat. Although most manufacturers have dropped this ingredient in salad dressings, it still in appears occasionally for example, in Wishbone Blue Cheese Dressing. Other Ingredients. Some people prefer to stay away from foods that have a long list of additives, either because they would prefer to eat foods closer to a natural state or because they dont trust ingredients they cant pronounce. Others find that dressings with a lot of strange ingredients simply dont taste as good, or have a texture that is off putting. For example, there are quite a few salad dressings on the market whose first or second ingredient is water. Those dressings tend to have a lot of vegetable gums and other ingredients to add body back into the dressing. I find it harder to dress a salad with these gloppier dressings. The Best Salad Dressing Make Your OwnIt is incredibly easy to make your own salad dressing. You need Oil. Vinegar or lemon juice. Salt and Pepper. Optional Herbs, spices, fruit, other flavorings, mustard mustard actually helps hold it together so it doesnt separate as easily. The ratio of oil to vinegar should be about 3 to 1. Shake it all together in a jar or whisk in a bowl. Thats all there is to it. To make a creamy dressing, start with mayonnaise andor sour cream as a base, and add whatever flavorings you want. Herb mixtures often work well just check for sugar or extra carbs. Thin with vinegar or lemon juice if desired. To get you started, here are some salads and salad dressing recipes Source Brown, Melody, Ferruzzi, et al. Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full fat than with fat reduced salad dressings. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.