Trying to Find the Best Greek Dressing
by Shereen Jegtvig
A few posts ago, I explained what to look for when choosing a salad dressing, so now I want to take a look at Greek dressings. Greek dressings remind me of olive oil with its monounsaturated fats that are good for your heart, and maybe a bit of tangy feta cheese and oregano. These dressings can be creamy, which is delicious but usually higher in saturated fat, or vinaigrette dressings that are usually lower in fat and calories. The creamy dressings, or the dressings that contain lots of cheese, may be high in saturated fat – we’ll need to look out for that.
Greek dressings typically aren’t sweet, so I wouldn’t worry much about large amounts of added sugar or sweeteners, but some food manufacturers sneak a little high fructose corn syrup to boost flavor. I want to look out for emulsifiers too – they’re what makes the oil and other ingredients stay mixed together. Some emulsifiers found in salad dressings include xanthan gum and cellulose gum, which are types of carbohydrates, and propylene glycol alginate that comes from kelp. All these emulsifiers appear to be safe for human use, but if you feel you’re sensitive to these ingredients, you may wish to avoid them. I would also like to look for dairy products and soy, just to find a dressing for those who need to avoid these common allergens.
Saturated Fat
The FoodEssentials database shows five Greek dressings, so let’s rank them by presence of saturated fat.
What you see on the chart is number of grams of saturated fat per 100 grams of dressing (it’s easier to make direct comparisons among products that way). An actual serving size is about 30 grams (or about two tablespoons). Of course, if you drown your salad in dressing, you could easily be eating two or three servings. What this boils down to, is that the three dressings on the chart with 5 or more grams per 100 grams all contain 8 to 10% of your daily limit of saturated fat in just one 30 gram serving. That’s a lot for a food that should be used as a condiment.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
While none of these dressings would be considered a very sweet dressing, there may be some HFCS lurking in the bottles.
As you see, three dressings are free from high fructose corn syrup, but two dressing contain small amounts. So far the Good Seasons Greek Vinaigrette is doing well on our charts.
Emulsifiers:
These ingredients are almost unavoidable in bottled salad dressing. You’ll see all five dressings contain emulsifiers.
As I previously stated, research shows these emulsifiers to be safe, but if they make you uncomfortable, you’ll have a difficult time with salad dressings – you may want to add a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar to your salads instead.
Common Allergens:
Let’s look for the presence of dairy products.
Only the Maple Grove Farms Fat Free is non-dairy. The others contain various amounts of milk and cheese. Let’s check out soy.
Again, only the Maple Grove Farms Fat Free doesn’t contain soy.
And the Winner Is…
Well, there really isn’t a clear-cut winner here, but the Maple Grove Farms is probably the best choice if your avoiding saturated fats, soy or dairy, but it’s not a good choice if you’re avoiding HFCS. The Good Seasons brand sounds good because it uses some extra virgin olive oil, but it really has a lot of additives that takes it out of the running. The other dressings are high in saturated fat and additives. Maybe I’ll just use the fresh olive oil and balsamic vinegar for my salad.
Learn More About Other Foods
Use our Foodessentials database to explore other foods for your salad:
Diced Canned Tomatoes and High Fructose Corn Syrup
Shereen Jegtvig has a masters degree in human nutrition and 16 years clinical experience in nutritional counseling. She writes about nutrition for About.com and TypeAMom.net. She is also the co-author of the upcoming book, Superfoods For Dummies.
Does it suprise you the amount of added ingredients in these Salad dressings?
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