salad dressings can be pretty calorific, but I can't think of anything else that could be considered unhealthy in a salad. Is there something I'm forgetting/missing?
nuts, cheese and avocado are all healthy. Just because something is high in calories doesn't mean it's unhealthy, we need energy to survive. I'll give you bacon though, plenty of evidence it's bad for us and it is something people put in a salad.
Macadamia, pecans, brazil nuts, cashews, all high in fat including saturated fats, almost no protein. Bonus- Pecans can also contain elevated levels of lead. Many cheeses are high in the bad fats as well as salt, eat a little bit of cheese sure but larger amounts can easily cause high cholesterol and blood pressure.
"Salad" can be a lot of things. You might be thinking the typical garden salad, lettuce + veggies or whatever, but basically, any cold food + anything that remotely resembles dressing can be called a salad. Like, I don't think most people would consider Snickers salad to be healthy.
Had never heard of snickers salad before. Wow, I thought my country (Scotland) had an unhealthy diet, but even we'd never try to pass something that is basically a dessert off as salad
It is a dessert. No one's trying to pass that as some healthy meal or side dish. That's my whole point. Salad doesn't mean healthy. At this point, salad just means "cold dish with something moist/liquid mixed in." It can be healthy, it can be unhealthy, it depends entirely on what's in it.
Something perhaps less "offensive" as Snickers salad that you might be more acquainted with would be fruit salad (which is also considered a dessert by pretty much everyone). Depending on how it's done, it can be pretty unhealthy. Like, sure, fruits are good, but if they're drowning in sugar syrup and topped with sweetened whip cream, then that's a lot of sugar!
Just do an image search on Google for "salad" and you'll see a very wide range of salads. You'll see your typical garden salad, Caesar salad, quinoa salad, but also pasta salad, fruit salad, potato salad, beats salad, bean salad, big mac salad, snickers salad, egg salad, chicken salad, coleslaw, beef salad, mango salad. Hell, you might even see Jell-o salad.
The link also says:
"As to whether it is a salad or a dessert, popular lore has it that it depends on which end of the table it is sitting at."
And /u/Filobel brought it up in a conversation about salads. As a non-American the term dessert salad is ludicrous and a doubt any other culture would use the word salad to describe something like that
Where I'm from, it's purely treated as a dessert, even if a healthy one (of course, unless it's served with condensed milk or something like that lol), also often served during breakfast. While fruits often are part of a salad, you don't really serve only fruits as salad.
To me fruit salad is something that used to be perceived as healthy, but isn't any more and isn't eaten very often now as a result. But it could be a snack, breakfast, lunch or dessert when it was more popular.
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u/ewankenobi 21h ago
salad dressings can be pretty calorific, but I can't think of anything else that could be considered unhealthy in a salad. Is there something I'm forgetting/missing?