Does eating a salad first help you eat less?
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It does if the salad is big and light. At Penn State, a large, light salad eaten before a pasta lunch cut the whole lunch, salad included, by 12%. The same size bowl made richer with more dressing and cheese raised it by 17%. The salad you start with decides which way it goes.
“Start with a salad” is common diet advice, and people follow it with whatever salad is on the menu. A caesar, a wedge with blue cheese or a bowl with candied nuts and a lot of dressing all count as a salad first. In the trial, the rich salads made people eat more in total.
What we’d do
If you want to eat less at dinner, start with a big bowl of leaves and vegetables, a tablespoon of vinaigrette and no cheese or croutons, then have your main. If the salad on the menu is a caesar, have it as part of the meal and order a smaller main, since a rich starter adds to dinner.
A rich salad first works like the bread basket. It comes before the meal and adds to it, where a light one takes the place of some of it.
The trial
Barbara Rolls’s lab at Penn State had 42 women eat lunch in the lab once a week for 7 weeks. Each week they got one of six first-course salads, or no salad, followed by pasta that they could eat as much of as they liked. They had to finish the salad. The salads came in two sizes, 150 g or 300 g, at three levels of richness, 0.33, 0.67 or 1.33 calories per gram. The researchers changed the richness by changing the amount and kind of dressing and cheese.
| Salad eaten first | About | Whole lunch, against no salad |
|---|---|---|
| Small and light, 150 g | 50 calories | 7% less |
| Large and light, 300 g | 100 calories | 12% less |
| Small and rich, 150 g | 200 calories | 8% more |
| Large and rich, 300 g | 400 calories | 17% more |
The middle salads’ results aren’t in the published summary. When two salads had the same calories, the bigger, lighter one led to eating less.
These were single lunches in a lab, the women had to finish the salad, and everyone was a woman from one university town. That tells us what happens at one meal, and less about months of dinners. A year-long trial from the same lab found that women told to eat more water-rich food like vegetables lost a little more weight and felt less hungry, which points the same way.
Where common salads land
| Salad | Calories | Calories per gram | Nearest trial salad |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side salad with a tablespoon of ranch | 100 | 0.42 | Large and light (12% less) |
| Side salad with 2 tablespoons of ranch | 164 | 0.64 | The middle salads (no result published) |
| Caesar with 2 tablespoons of dressing | 360 | 1.53 | Large and rich (17% more) |
The side salad is 2 cups of romaine, half a tomato and half a cup of cucumber. One extra tablespoon of ranch moves it from the trial’s best salad to the middle.
Try yours
The starter or meal calculator puts two bowls side by side, light and rich, and shows what each did to the lunch in the trial. You can also send your own bowl from the bowl builder and see which trial salad it sits nearest.
4 sources
- Rolls, Roe and Meengs, Salad and satiety: energy density and portion size of a first-course salad affect energy intake at lunch, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2004pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Ello-Martin et al., Dietary energy density in the treatment of obesity: a year-long trial comparing 2 weight-loss diets, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2007pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Gebhardt and Thomas, Nutritive Value of Foods, Home and Garden Bulletin 72, USDA Agricultural Research Service, 2002ars.usda.gov
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, caesarnutritionvalue.org
