Should I get dressing on the side?
Yes, and then use part of it. A 2 oz cup holds about four tablespoons, which is about 256 calories of ranch or 320 of caesar, and on a salad with chicken that’s more than half the bowl. Pour one or two tablespoons, a quarter to half of the cup, and leave the rest.
Dressing on the side is the classic diet order, and it only works if the cup comes back with something in it. If you pour it all on, or dip until it’s gone, you end up exactly where you’d have been if the kitchen had dressed it.
What we’d do
Always get it on the side, and pour a quarter of the cup for a light salad or half of it for a meal salad, then toss so it coats everything. If you’d rather dip, dip the fork before each bite instead of dunking the leaves. Pick oil and vinegar when it’s on offer, and measure that too, since a full cup of vinaigrette has more calories than a full cup of ranch.
Getting dressing on the side is like pouring your own wine instead of letting the waiter keep topping up your glass. You decide how much.
What a 2 oz cup holds
| Dressing | A full cup, 4 tablespoons | Half the cup | A quarter of the cup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Olive oil | 476 | 238 | 119 |
| Olive oil and vinegar, 3 to 1 | 359 | 180 | 90 |
| Caesar | 320 | 160 | 80 |
| Blue cheese | 308 | 154 | 77 |
| Italian, bottled | 276 | 138 | 69 |
| French | 268 | 134 | 67 |
| Ranch | 256 | 128 | 64 |
| Thousand island | 236 | 118 | 59 |
Calories from the USDA’s values. Two fluid ounces is four tablespoons.
The vinaigrette surprises people. Oil and vinegar is mostly oil, and oil has more calories per spoon than the creamy dressings, which are partly water. On the side it’s the better dressing, as long as it’s measured.
How the cup changes a salad
On a salad with chicken (3 cups of romaine, a palm of grilled chicken, a tomato and half a cup of cucumber, about 197 calories before dressing):
| Ranch | Total | The dressing’s share |
|---|---|---|
| A quarter of the cup, 1 tablespoon | 261 | 24% |
| Half the cup, 2 tablespoons | 325 | 39% |
| The whole cup, 4 tablespoons | 453 | 56% |
Don’t go to zero, though. Some fat on a salad is what lets you absorb the beta-carotene in the vegetables, and with a fat-free dressing almost none gets in. In the 2004 Iowa State study, a dressing with 6 g of oil already let more through than fat-free, and a tablespoon of ranch has 6.7 g of fat.
Try it
On the pour, slide any dressing from a teaspoon to a quarter cup and watch its share of the bowl. For the rest of the order, see what is the healthiest salad to order.
5 sources
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, ranchnutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, caesarnutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, oil, salad or cooking, olivenutritionvalue.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
