Americans today have a complicated relationship with food. In a climate that now includes $70-a-day juice cleanses, four gluten-free lifestyle magazines, and a 'superfoods' industry set to hit $130 billion in 2015, we're also a culture fascinated with achieving some perceived pinnacle of well-being, reports Jen Schwartz. (1)
As a growing number of people dramatically retool their diets in the pursuit of health, some are cutting out half the categories on the food pyramid altogether. In certain cases, this hyper-controlled eating becomes a compulsion, and the anxiety of consuming something deemed 'bad for you,' like a piece of cheese, feels paralyzing. The result is a new kind of eating disorder doctors are calling orthorexia,. Just as anorexia is driven by fear of being fat, orthorexia is driven by fear of being unhealthy. The former fixates on quantity, the latter on quality. (1)
With all this there's one food that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped refrigerated around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate. It's salad, and here are some reasons why we need to rethink it, says Tamar Haspel. (2)
Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it's a leafy-green waste of resources.
Researcher Charles Benbrook and colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index—a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain per 100 calories. Four of the five lowest-ranking vegetables (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, iceberg lettuce and celery. The fifth is eggplant. (2)
These foods' nutritional profile can be partly explained by one simple fact: they're almost all water. Although water figures prominently in just about every vegetable, those four salad vegetables top the list at 95 to 97 percent water. A head of iceberg lettuce has the same water content as a bottle of Evian (1-liter size) and is only marginally more nutritious.
Salad has unfortunate repercussions in our food supply and lettuce has a couple of number one unenviable rankings in the food world. For starters, it's the top source of food waste, vegetable division, with more than 1 billion pounds of uneaten salad every year. (3)
It is also the chief culprit for foodborne illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, green leafies accounted for 22 percent of all food-borne illnesses from 1998-2008. To be fair, 'leafy vegetables,' in the CDC category, also includes cabbage, spinach, and other kinds of green, but the reason the category dominates is that the greens are often eaten raw, as in salad. (2)
In September and October of 2006 nearly 200 people who dined on infested spinach became ill with bloody diarrhea. Thirty-one developed severe kidney disease, and three people died. The issue was traced to the toxic strain of E. coli at a California ranch. This spate of illness was just one of at least three major produce-linked outbreaks of E. coli that occurred in 2006, triggering a nation wide fear of fresh vegetables. Lettuce was the culprit in two of the outbreaks. (4)
Bruce Ames lists 49 natural pesticides and metabolites in cabbage including: glucosinolates, indoles, isothiocyanates, goitrin, cyanides, alcohols, ketones, phenols and tannins. Beets, celery, lettuce, spinach, radishes, and rhubarb all contain about 200 mg of nitrate per 100 g portion. (5)
So, with all this, perhaps we consumers should think more about eating fruits, vegetables, and grains, and minimize the salads.
Jack Dini
Livermore, CA
References
1. Jen Schwartz, “Striving for the perfect diet is making us sick,” popsi.com, February 5, 2015
2. Tamar Haspel, “Why salad is so overrated,”
The Washington Post, August 23, 2015
3. Jean C. Buzby et al., “Estimated fresh produce shrink and food loss in US supermarkets,”
Agriculture, 5 (3), 626, 2015
4. Josie Glausiusz, “Toxic salad: what are fecal bacteria doing on our dinner plates?”,
Discover, April 2007
5. Bruce N. Ames. “Does current cancer risk assessment harm health?”,
George C. Marshall Institute, October 1993
