What is the healthiest salad dressing?
Olive oil with vinegar or lemon, one to two tablespoons. It has the fat your body needs to absorb the carotenoids in the vegetables, no added sugar and no salt you didn’t add yourself. Three parts oil to one part vinegar is about 90 calories a tablespoon.
The bottles that look healthiest are often the ones that work worst. “Light” and fat-free dressings save calories by taking out the fat, and the fat is what carries the orange and red pigments from carrots, tomatoes and spinach into your blood. In a 2004 Iowa State study, 7 people ate the same salad with a fat-free dressing and with dressings made with oil. With the fat-free one, almost none of the beta-carotene or lycopene got in.
What we’d do
Make your own. Shake three tablespoons of olive oil with one of vinegar or lemon juice in a jar, add salt, pepper and a little mustard if you like, and use one to two tablespoons of it on a meal salad. If you love ranch or blue cheese, keep it, but measure a tablespoon and count it. The one dressing we’d skip is fat-free.
Making vinaigrette at home is like making your own coffee. It takes about a minute, and you decide exactly what goes in.
Per tablespoon
| Dressing | Calories | Fat | Saturated fat | Sodium | Sugar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Olive oil and vinegar, 3 to 1 | 90 | 10.5 g | 1.3 g | 0 | 0 |
| Olive oil | 119 | 13.5 g | 1.9 g | 0 | 0 |
| Caesar | 80 | 8.5 g | 1.3 g | 178 mg | 0.4 g |
| Blue cheese | 77 | 8 g | 1.5 g | 167 mg | 1 g |
| Italian, bottled | 69 | 7 g | 1 g | 116 mg | 1.6 g |
| French | 67 | 6 g | 1.5 g | 214 mg | 3 g |
| Ranch | 64 | 6.7 g | 1 g | 135 mg | 0.7 g |
| Thousand island | 59 | 6 g | 0.9 g | 109 mg | 2 g |
| Light Italian | 16 | 1 g | 0.2 g | 118 mg | 1 g |
| Lemon juice | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 mg | 0 |
From the USDA. The vinaigrette is built from the olive oil and vinegar rows.
What makes oil and vinegar the best pick
It has fat, and the fat does a job. In the Iowa State study, a dressing with 6 g of oil let more carotenoids through than fat-free, and one with 28 g let more through again. A 2012 trial with 29 adults found the amount of fat mattered more than the kind. Two tablespoons of a three to one vinaigrette is about 21 g of fat, right in that range.
It has nothing else. Our bowl builder counts bottled dressings as ultra-processed, as meals.guide does, and 2 tablespoons of ranch on a salad with chicken makes 39% of the bowl ultra-processed. Swap it for a tablespoon of olive oil with vinegar and that share drops to zero.
It doesn’t add salt. A tablespoon of French has 214 mg of sodium and caesar 178. Two tablespoons of caesar plus the croutons and parmesan on a caesar salad come to about 900 mg.
Fat-free and “light” dressings look best on calories, but they leave the vegetables’ carotenoids in the bowl. Our builder counts that. The vitamin A from vegetables only counts in proportion to the fat in the bowl, so a salad with chicken and 2 tablespoons of light Italian is a B, and the one change it suggests is a tablespoon of olive oil with vinegar in its place.
Try it
Pick a dressing on the pour and watch its calories and its share of the bowl as you slide. When a dressing has no fat, the tool says so.
6 sources
- USDA Standard Reference, oil, salad or cooking, olivenutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, ranchnutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, caesarnutritionvalue.org
- Gebhardt and Thomas, Nutritive Value of Foods, Home and Garden Bulletin 72, USDA Agricultural Research Service, 2002ars.usda.gov
- Brown et al., Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2004pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Goltz et al., Meal triacylglycerol profile modulates postprandial absorption of carotenoids in humans, Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, 2012pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
