Spotted* FAT FREE Blue Cheese Salad Dressing…not exactly!
A bone to pick with Wish-Bone
If there is one place the health nuts and dieters of the world can turn for nutritious food, a good ole’ fashioned salad remains as a viable option. However, unless you like the taste of plain lettuce leaves and sliced tomatoes (we’re not all rabbits), you are probably going to drizzle some choice salad dressing over your sprouts to give it just a tad bit more taste. But before you do, make sure the dressing you select lives up to its labeling.
Wish-Bone, a popular dressing brand, sells a “Fat Free Chunky Blue Cheese Dressing”. Already your health antenna should go up as anytime you mix the words “cheese” and “fat free” in a sentence, something might be awry. Cheese, by nature, is largely made of fat, though you wouldn’t know it by walking down the dairy isle. Looking closer at the ingredients on the Wish-Bone dressing you see something very interesting; it lists partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil* with the asterisk. The asterisk refers to the claim “Adds an insignificant amount of fat”. Well well well, I think I will be the judge of what is or isn’t significant enough to put into my body, thank you!
Here is a great example of how producers work the system to market their product. They can claim that their dressing is fat free as long as PER SERVING there is less than .50 grams of trans fat. According to the label, there is 16 servings per bottle of dressing. When was the last time you got 16 separate servings out of one
Trans Fat* - Click for larger view.
bottle of dressing? In reality, most of us drench our salad until the lettuce weeps and the cucumber is sufficiently coated. You might use up half the bottle on one medium sized salad alone! Add up all those “servings” and you will find much more fat than “fat free”. There is a slew of products on the market that manipulate serving sizes to appeal to whatever market they choose.
Here is the simple answer; If it is in the ingredients list, you are eating it. And in this case, your healthy salad is giving you a not so healthy dose of trans fat.
