Soylent Green: The Traditional Green Salad Sucks!

What do you imagine when you think of healthy eating and weightloss? What’s the one food that comes to mind when you’re asked about low calorie, healthy eating? For most people, it’s the traditional green salad. In fact, one of the most frequent complaints I get when I talk to people about being healthy is “Yah, I would eat better, but I can’t stand salads” or “I just can’t take all that rabbit food.” And you know what? These people are right. The traditional green salad is absolutely awful!

Two Reason To Eliminate Green Salads From Your Diet

First, the traditional green salad has horrible texture and flavor. It’s usually 90% lettuce, with a bit of shredded carrot, one or two slices of cucumber and a cherry tomato. Just about every restaurant has this salad on the menu and it always looks the same. Sometimes, if they want to get fancy, they’ll toss a couple of pieces of hardboiled egg in there, or perhaps a stale piece of bread, but it still comes down to 90% lettuce. No offense to lettuce, but it’s not the tastiest of food. It’s essentially water in plant form and it tastes like it too. It’s not that lettuce tastes bad, it’s just that it has virtually no flavor of its own. So what do people do when they’re faced with a heaping pile of bland lettuce garnished with a few other items on their plate? Ahh, the answer to this brings us to our second reason to can the traditional green salad.

What do you do when you’re faced with an unappetizing meal? Drown it in sauce of course! And that’s what most people do with their salad. They drown it in creamy dressing until it has some kind of interesting flavor. Of course, they just added hundreds of calories of fat but hey, they’re still being healthy right? I mean, they’re eating a green salad! That must be healthy.

Unfortunately, the traditional green salad is the exact opposite of healthy. Devoid of most vegetables other than lettuce, it offers us very few nutrients. And smothered in creamy dressing, it contains a lot of fat you don’t need. In other words, the food most people think of when they think of eating healthy is actually not the healthiest of alternatives.

Fixing The Green Salad

So how do we fix this? Vegetables are a core part of every healthy diet and we do want to consume more of them. Yet the traditional source of them, the salad, seems bad. Well, the answer is to fix up your salad and the way in which you eat it. The first problem with the green salad is what it contains. Simply put, it has too much lettuce in it, which really has very little in the way of nutritional value. Instead, let’s do the following:

Take two tomatoes, a cucumber, some green onions, mushrooms, spinach and half an avocado. Chop them all up into little pieces. Mix them all up and season lightly with pepper, salt or some other of your favorite spices. Right there you have a green salad with some kick. It has flavor and it has far more nutritional value than the traditional lettuce centric version. By the way, my basic recipe here can be modified to your heart’s content. How about adding some zucchini? Eggplant? Maybe a bit of chopped up hard boiled egg? A bit of blue cheese? All of these things can be used in moderation to give a green salad some great texture and flavor. No dressing by the way. If you make your salad right, you won’t need dressing.

Eating Green

And now for our second part of fixing the salad, how to eat one. Why think of the salad as an appetizer? Most restaurants seem to consider it an item to serve before the main dish arrives, something to keep us busy while they cook our food. Maybe this makes sense for the horrible green salads they offer, but a good salad can be eaten with your meal, as an integral part of it. In fact, you can use your salad as a side dish to make your meal healthier. For example, when I was growing up, a dinner might be chicken and a green salad. The green salad was eaten with the chicken as a side dish in much the same way many Americans consume mashed potatoes with their dinner. The dinner was much healthier this way because it combined healthy vegetables while reducing the overall calories. So stop thinking of your salad as something to order before the food to make yourself feel less guilty. A good salad should be eaten as part of the meal as a substitute for less healthy dishes.

Summary

Dump the traditional green salad. It tastes bad, looks bad and is actually bad for you because of all the dressing it usually comes with. Replace it with a salad you can actually enjoy as a main part of your meal.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!