All the health nuts on your Instagram load their bodies with leafy vegetables for lunch, while you scuff down hot rice and oil-rich stew (or stew-laced oil?), and you probably feel more and more guilty because, really, lettuce should be your best friend.
Or so they say. Apparently, salads are worth all the hype! Here are three reasons you should rethink it!
1. Salad veggies are quite low in nutrition
Amazing, right? Nutrition experts developed a ‘Nutrient Quality Index’ – a way to measure the number of nutrients a food contains. The results were quite startling: Four out of five of the lowest-ranking vegetables were cucumbers, celery, lettuce, and radishes – all salad ingredients! So your body isn’t actually getting as much nourishment as you thought it was, is it?
2. Salads trick healthy eaters into making poor dietary choices
A lot of the time, ‘a healthy salad’ is really just good old unhealthy stuff garnished with a few shavings of carrots and leaves of lettuce. Before you call something a ‘salad’, picture it without the lettuce, tomatoes or carrots, and consider how good it actually is for you and your body. Of course, salad isn’t always a bad choice; it just depends on what’s in it!
3. Dieters tend to overcompensate with other food
The truth is that the majority of salads are not filling, and as a result, you might be tempted to satisfy your hunger with more (sometimes unhealthy) food. Or B, you feel smug because you had a ‘light lunch’, and believe you’re entitled to some not-so-great food choices for the rest of the day.
So think twice before you order that salad! You might just be better off with some carbs.