by Gail M Feldman

Created on: October 25, 2010

All salad dressings contain fat. Some contain animal fat (many creamy dressings) and others contain vegetable oil (oil-and-vinegar) but all fat, be it butter, lard or extra-extra virgin olive oil, contains the exact same number of calories per unit. Therefore in terms of fat content, every salad dressing is equal. However, fat is not salad dressing's only ingredient. Another major ingredient in most is sugar, and it is virtually always processed sugar.

You cannot reasonably eliminate all fat from your diet; your hair will fall out, your skin will slough off, and you will be at risk for every disease association with fat-soluble vitamin deficiency. Gulping down vitamin pills is useless if you're not already taking in those same vitamins in your food; it is not by accident the pills are called "supplements" rather than "replacements." However, processed sugar (white sugar, high fructose corn syrup) has absolutely no nutritional value at all, and can be deleted from your diet not only with no ill effects but with quite a few beneficial ones. (For example, the number one cause of elevated blood serum cholesterol is tobacco-smoking; number two is processed sugar. Animal fat is number three, and the first to have actual nutritional value.) Nature provides useful complex carbohydrates galore; you don't need a Snickers bar (or a half-gallon of creamy salad dressing on one's lettuce) to satisfy your body's carb requirements.

When Adele Davisadvised taking in the equivalent of three tablespoons of salad dressing a day to ensure proper representation of fat in the diet, she was probably not thinking of creamy dressing, but it wouldn't have mattered, weightwise (healthwise, it might have). She also added that most people already take in much more than that, but her imitators nonetheless began to advise dieters to drink three tablespoons of dressing a day (which is not what Davis said). That is the same kind of illogic that might be keeping you from eating eggs, for fear that the cholesterol in the yolks will clog your arteries; as it happens, egg yolks also contain lecithin, a substance that dissolves blood serum cholesterol. None of this, by the way, takes into account the difference between good and bad cholesterols; the former are absolutely necessary for processing the latter, for energy production (which means, among other things, that good cholesterol helps you LOSE weight), for regulation of insulin levels and for protection of liver function. 

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