In a complete flip reverse on everything we thought we ever knew: apparently salad is actually not that good for you.
According to both the Washington Post and the Guardian, the go-to detox dish can actually be pretty unhealthy.
Here’s why:
It’s not very nutritious
According to the Washington Post: ‘a head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a 1 litre bottle of Evian’. Therefore you would actually get much more nutrition if you swapped the leaves for vegetables containing less water, like a sweet potato (which is 77% water).
Take away the leaves and what have you got?
Once you minus the watery leaves, is what’s left on your plate really that good for you? For example, take a ceaser salad: croutons, cheese, chicken and ceaser dressing (which has 78 calories in a teaspoon).
It can apparently make you ill
Not to alarm anyone but the Centres for Disease Control has said that green ‘leafy vegetables’ were responsible for 22% of all food-borne illnesses between 1998-2008. Ew.
It’s bad for the environment
We’ve all: bought a bag of salad from the supermarket, not fancied it two days in a row and before you know it, it’s gone all brown and gross and had to be thrown away. We’re not alone, salad is one of the biggest food waste offenders. In 2013, Tesco said that 68% bagged salad is wasted – both from supermarkets and at home.
This obviously means that next time we're at a restaurant, torn between going for a burger or a 'healthy' salad, we may as well just get the burger. Because, really, it's not actually that much worse for you? Right?
Words by: Olivia Blair
