Best picks and skips at the salad bar
Salad bars can be diet salvation or junk-food minefields. Here’s how to get from one end to the other without detonating an explosion of bad fats, sodium, sugar, and refined carbs.
1. Go dark on greens: Build a vitamin – and fiber-packed foundation by starting with roughly 1 cup of spinach and romaine leaves (for more than half of your daily vitamin A and all of your K, plus some C, folate, two potent vision protectors, and more). Skip’em: Lighter greens tend to offer less nutritionally. Iceberg lettuce, for instance, delivers only about 7% of the A you need, some K and not much else.
2. Go bright on veggies: Next, add about 1 cup of the most colorful crudités – broccoli, carrots, cherry tomatoes, green and red peppers, beets, like that. Ounce for ounce, vibrant veggies give you more fiber, minerals, vitamins, and disease-fighting antioxidants than their paler companions, like celery and cucumbers. Skip’em: Anything coated in mayo or an indefinable dressing, including carrot and raisin mixes, cole slaw, and potato salad.
