Calories, fat and sodium — defeating the purpose of a salad

By Daniel Neman St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Apr 20, 2016

Daniel Neman is a food writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The Barbecue Ranch Chicken Salad from The Cheesecake Factory has 960 calories. Compared to other salads from the same restaurant, that's almost healthy.

For years, the Big Mac has been held up as the pinnacle of food that is bad for you. Other foods have long surpassed it, of course, but with 540 calories the Big Mac still sets the standard in our collective mind.

Those of us who are watching our weight (45 million of us, according to the Boston Medical Center) know to cast aside double-decker hamburgers when we go to restaurants and instead order something healthful and better for us, such as a salad.

What could be wrong with a salad? It’s lettuce, and lettuce has almost no calories. Right?

But there are salads and then there are salads. The Cheesecake Factory, for instance, offers 13 salads for dinner. One of them, the Seared Tuna Tataki Salad, has 440 calories. Another, the Weight Management Spicy Chicken Salad, clocks in at 510.

That’s a lot, but it’s still fewer than a Big Mac. So that’s something.

But the hugely popular chain offers two more Weight Management salads, and these both contain 570 calories. In other words, if you are looking to manage your weight you are better off eating a Big Mac than a Weight Management salad from the Cheesecake Factory.

I thought about this recently when my attention was grabbed by a listicle, one of those online come-ons that try to get you to click on multiple pages with tawdry headlines and little information.

If you have a computer, you’ve seen them: “The 17 most outrageous things ever said by movie stars (No. 13 literally made my head explode!)” or “32 incredibly gruesome deaths you won’t be able to stop watching!” or “This puppy saw this kitten and you’ll never believe what happened next!”

The one that actually worked on me was “25 salads that have more calories than a Big Mac.”

It’s true. Even when you’re not managing your weight, you can wind up eating more than a Big Mac’s worth of calories in lettuce and extras, especially the extras.

So I probably should not have been shocked to see that, according to the list, a Chicken Strip Deluxe Salad from Denny’s actually contains 590 calories.

In my innocence, I assumed that was at the top of the scale. But then I realized that the Denny’s salad was actually No. 25 on the list. The others went up from there.

Trader Joe’s Baby Spinach Salad was No. 24. How can a baby spinach salad be fattening, especially one from the seemingly wholesome Trader Joe’s?

But it’s not the baby spinach that gets you, it’s the blue cheese, dried cranberries and candied walnuts — all the good stuff that helps you forget you’re eating baby spinach.

The list progresses upward, through the Chicken and Avocado Cobb Salad from Panera/St. Louis Bread Co. to the Costco Food Court Chicken Caesar Salad, which boasts 670 calories and 2,680 mg of sodium. That’s more sodium than is in a teaspoon of salt and more than the recommended amount for an entire day.

And we’re still only at No. 20.

The Red Robin Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad (No. 11 with 873 calories and 1,705 mg of sodium) may sound low in fat because the chicken is grilled, not fried. But it has almost twice as much fat as a Big Mac. At this point, a Big Mac is starting to sound kind of healthy.

The first salad to break the 1,000-calorie mark is No. 6, the Chicken Caesar Salad from The Old Spaghetti Factory. It has 1,120 calories.

That’s a lot, but it’s still not as many as the same restaurant’s Cobb Salad, with 1,290 calories and 2,560 mg of sodium, or Jason’s Deli’s Chili Taco Salad, which has 1,310 calories per serving.

And the winner? The winner is the Crispy Chicken Tender Salad from Red Robin. One of those suckers will stuff you full of 1,348 calories and 92 grams of fat. That’s like eating a Big Mac and two slices of cheesecake.

But that was only No. 1 because the listicle did not include our friends at the Cheesecake Factory. Their Caesar Salad With Chicken, which you might reasonably assume to be healthy, crushes the scales with an astonishing 1,510 calories. That’s worse than eating a Big Mac, a small fries, a 16-ounce Coke and a chocolate shake.

That’s ridiculous. That’s absurd. It’s enough to make your head explode.

One ought check out the nutrition label on an Applebee’s Asian Chicken Salad to TRULY blow one’s mind!!!!!

http://www.applebees.com/~/media/docs/Applebees_Nutritional_Info.pdf page 5

As you waste your breath complaining about life, someone out there is breathing their last.

Appreciate what you have.

Be thankful and stop complaining.

Live more, complain less.

Have more smiles, less stress.

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