Olive Garden Salad

I went to the Olive Garden tonight for dinner. It may sound boring but I wanted to write a post about their salad.

 I ordered their salad with no dressing. According to this website the salad is 120 calories. On the Olive Garden menu, if I remember right, it says 130 calories. But how can a dry salad with no dressing, mostly consisting of lettuce, which according to this website only contains 8 calories? I'll tell you how. They add croutons. Now you ask, why would they want to make something and try and make it higher in calories? And I say the reason is this, though of course I may be wrong, because their salad with dressing is 350 calories. And if it really is 350 calories, and let's say (being generous) the salad started with 50 calories, minus the croutons.

 So the salad increases 7 fold in calories with just the dressing. And what does the wonderful salad sounding name "Italian Dressing" actually contain? Almost total fat containing saturated fat that is responsible for causing heart disease and diabetes. Eating the regular salad at the Olive Garden is not by any means a healthy choice. And I'm not even counting the other calories that are added when cheese is added. What, perhaps 500 calories? So something that started at 50 calories is now over 500 calories.

 So this is what it gets to. Eating a salad by itself would contain no more than 50-100 calories per pound (CPP). Adding salad dressing is 4000 CPP. Yet oil is considered heart healthy and carbohydrates are considered a bad food in today's dieting America. And Americans are getting fatter and sicker, and we wonder why.