Asalad with too much dressing and the wrong ingredients can cause more harm than good. Here’s how… If you are planning to go on a diet, forget ordering a salad the next time you’re eating out. Did you know that a restaurant salad with a dressing has as many as 1,000 calories? It joins the list of those foods that can make you pile on the pounds and tip the weighing scales. And people who have tried these, have had a bad experience…

How it affected people

Says Mumbai-based advertising executive Amisha Sinha. “I went on a lunch salad diet two months ago and decided to just have carrots with a little peanut butter for my mid-day meal. But slowly without my realising it, I started to dab on too much peanut butter on the veggies. It made me put on a lot of weight.” Another city-based entrepreneur Vikam Ramani has his own tale to tell. “To avoid a heavy meal, I thought I would switch to a simple, fresh salad at the canteen at a deli close to the office. They used to add a lot of mayonnaise and barbecue dressing to it, which I got used to for the taste and I didn’t realise the salads were actually making me sleepy and sluggish; till I had to discontinue them.”

Expert speak

What is unfortunate, says dietician Rima Goswami, is that people look at a salad with a automatic thumbs-up. “They just think anything connected with a salad has to be healthy and order everything on it. This is wrong; fried chicken, cheese and nuts all are culprits and avoidable.” Warns nutritionist Vaishali Mehta, “Having a salad like this is especially harmful for those with high-blood pressure. Salty ingredients contain high sodium levels. Instead try fresh lettuce, broccoli, beans, red peppers and sweet potato. Too much dressing is bad, try to just have a single tablespoon if it’s a large bowl.”