If you are subscribing to the metabolic efficiency way of eating, large salads can be a quick and easy meal, especially in the city where there is a new salad joint popping up on every corner. However, if you don’t really understand the philosophy or you think that just because it’s a salad it will be a ‘healthy’ meal then I’m here to help you out.
Don’t be fooled that just because it’s an option for your salad that it automatically means it’s a good choice. Watch out for the following salad sabotagers:
Raisins:
They may seem like a good choice because they used to be grapes and they are so small, how bad could they be? This is how bad – ¼ cup of raisins is a walloping 32g carbohydrate with only 2g of fiber. That is equivalent to eating about 2.5 slices of Wonder bread, except the bread has less sugar and more protein.
Dried Cranberries/Craisins:
Same story here – they seem non-threatening, so small and tasty, derived from a fruit. Sorry to burst the bubble again, but for a ⅓ cup it’s about 34g of carbohydrate, 31g from sugar. Again, eating 2.5 slices of Wonder bread is a better option, not that I recommend that either.
Wasabi Peas:
¼ cup of wasabi peas have about 19g of carbohydrate and 1g of fiber. So better than the first two but still very high for the small portion size and equivalent to eating more than 1 slice of Wonder bread.
Now imagine what that looks like if you have all of these things in the same salad! The serving sizes I list here are not that large, so most salad places are likely putting more than this into your salad. So now your healthy lunch contains 6+ slices of white Wonder bread. That’s a lot of bread! Time to reboot your salad and just say no to these tricky little devils.