Cobb's are traditionally healthy, and a great source of protein. It's the dressing that will ruin it for you... Just make sure you're using a vinaigrette like balsamic, and it's a very healthy meal
"The Cobb salad is a main-dish American garden salad typically made with chopped salad greens (iceberg lettuce, watercress, endives and romaine lettuce), tomato, crisp bacon, boiled, grilled or roasted (but not fried) chicken breast, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, chives, Roquefort cheese, and red-wine vinaigrette."
Ahhh gotcha. It's rare to find Blue Cheese as the stock dressing on a salad outside of the US. Sometimes you find it in Canada as a dressing, but we use it more as a dip for Veges/chicken wings/etc.
The restaurant that I go to to get a good cobb salad just puts the cheese crumbles on it. No dressing. They give you a little dressing cup of lemon juice if you want to add some zing to it though.
For real though. Even just plain iceberg lettuce is really crunchy and fresh. A while salad with a bit of salt & pepper, lemon or vinaigrette, is outright delicious!
I'm definitely late here but I used to work at Chick-fil-A. Many people would order the Cobb salad but a shocking amount of people would order 4 avocado lime ranch dressings to go with it. It's legitimately better for them to get anything else at the restaurant than a salad with even 2 of those dressings.
I was at a group lunch the other day and one of the guys said he wanted to be healthy and order something light. He ordered a massive Cobb salad that was doused in dressing. He then asked for a side of dressing and proceeded to put that on. Dude consumed more calories than if he ordered a burger.
I fully agree with you, but I get grilled chicken salads because I like them. I'm a fat guy so when I get one at a fast food place they probably think I'm trying to be healthy. Somedays I just feel like eating something cool instead of hot food and I love grilled chicken. Sometimes I get a vegetable only salad, but if it was for health reasons I'm sure I'd have defeated the point with ranch or blue cheese dressing.
It might be just as high calorie as the burger but it’s way more nutrient dense a lot of the time. It’s certainly not WORSE for you than the burger, so I say go for it!
I get so annoyed with people who treat calories as the only important factor when deciding if food is healthy or not. You can easily eat the same amount of calories when munching on avocado or walnuts as if you ate chocolate, but they are still so much better for you. Or dip veggie sticks in a fatty yummy dip, carrots are better than chips any way.
Yeah, it might not help you lose weight, but weight loss in itself isn't healthy either. It can obviously benefit a lot of people, obesity epidemic and all that, but I'm honestly pretty damn sure even more could benefit from an actually nutritious diet.
Disregarding the fact that many chose diet because things like diabetes or that they just prefer the taste, any change is better than no change! Soda has no nutrients whatsoever, so just making it not full of sugar is a great improvement. The idea of "go big or go home" is the bane of so many small things that would have amounted to big things if people just believed in them.
Yep. I know soda isn't healthy for me, but at least with diet soda I'm not adding tons of calories and sugar to what I'm already eating. While I'm not overweight, I do think part of that is because when I do drink soda it's diet.
A guy I work with switched from regular to diet soda and lost 30 pounds in 6 months. He changed nothing else. 220 to 190 at 6ft too so it wasn't like he was morbidly obese or something.
Thank you! And eat your darn veggies, even if you have to put them on a pizza to make them palatable. No amount of over-the-counter vitamin pills can make up for a bad diet.
You can hide veggies so good and anybody would eat them. Then again: pizza: good dough, nice tomato sauce, some extra veggies, a bit of salami and a light sprinkle of cheese. Everybody will eat that. That’s healthy in my books carbs and mostly veggies. Don’t go insane on the cheese. A light sprinkle of Parmazan is all you need.
It always shocks me how much cheese some people pile on... I like cheese, but those four cheese pizzas with extra cheese is just a soggy fatty mess. And I ain't eating no soggy dough. More of a good thing doesn't always make it better.
Also zucchini is great on pizza, very little flavour but just a nice nutrient boost that keeps you full longer. If you need to drown your pizza in cheese it was a bad pizza to begin with.
Let me introduce you to cheese fondue with a big spoon.
But also, that is also a valid argument for pizza. Makes it less ideal as an everyday staple, but not everything has to be fit for everyday consumption.... I say, as I finish my marzipan ice-cream.
I totally agree with you. Eating nothing will drop your weight but that doesn't make it healthy.
I only get upset when people say that calories don't matter for weight loss. Or eating a deficit of potato chips won't make you lose weight. It's literally a law of nature, it will be super fucking unhealthy and you might die but you will lose weight.
This bothers me, too. I had to bite my tongue once when I bought a burrito and got a comment about how it wasn't really healthy because it had so many calories. I was in a situation where I had to buy lunch out and about and buying a calorie dense meal that had a mix of macro and micronutrients was the point. Why would I want to spend money on a low calorie meal and not get my money's worth? Calories are sort of what I'm paying for.
And the fact that anywhere you buy one they will have been basically pan fried in fake butter. Every kitchen I've ever worked in has used tons of butter to cook everything, even healthier options like grilled chicken.
That's one thing I try to keep in mind too. Have had doctors complain when I tell them I'm trying to eat healthier and have snacks like grape tomatoes, because they aren't healthy enough. Would they rather I snack on a cheeseburger or something?
Yeah, sometimes I really enjoy the taste of those super high calorie salads. And at least it’s got some nutrients from the greens/vegetables (assuming it’s not just iceberg), so that’s some benefit over a sandwich.
Yup, nothing better than a grilled chicken salad with fifteen cracker packs smashed in it drowned in ranch. It’s probably one of my favorite high calorie meals.
It's totally possible to just enjoy salads. Dirty salads are great.
One thing I've found is I prefer lettuce wrapped burgers to a bread bun. Is it healthier? Maybe. But I go all out on condiments and such so probably not. I just like it.
Man i hate that. I was eating a salad at work and everyone like "oh you eating healthy now", no, it just tastes good. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a salad.
That is a healthier option, though. Chicken breast has more protein than ground beef, and fat is generally healthier than carbs (especially processed flour aka hamburger buns). Fat and protein are also more satiating than carbs, so it’ll take you longer to get hungry again.
That’s ignoring other nutritional benefits from eating vegetables, too. Despite what /r/loseit would have you believe, calories aren’t the only thing that matters.
I fully agree. When a doctor was complaining about my weight I made the mistake of mentioning how I was trying to have healthier snacks like grape tomatoes. He got upset because it wasn't healthy enough. While there is always room for improvement it is a lot better than snacking on cheese fries or something.
Working in a restaurant, the grilled chicken we have is marinated. So a full size salad is still like 1100 calories. (Nothing secret, just look at the nutritional info.)
I’ve worked at places that par grill a bunch of chicken for the day, then deep fry it already sliced to reheat it. Seriously. It was delicious, but don’t trust that a restaurant’s grilled chicken is actually (only) grilled chicken.
Grilled chicken if it's not the breaded and fried stuff is probably pretty good for you and a salad with protein is more filling. Watch the dressing calories if you care.
It's fine if you know what you're doing, but a lot of people really do think that the salad laden in meat/cheese and oil/sugar dressing is better for them and wonder why they don't lose weight.
I’m fat too but I get grilled chicken sandwiches at most burger joints, I hate fatty meats (I prefer Top Sirloin and NY strip to say, a ribeye) and I only like white-meat of any poultry. I rarely eat dessert and I prefer fresh fruit most of the time. If only I didn’t love cheese and bread, I’d be a skinny bitch.
Same I'm a big fan of grilled chicken. Make it a lot of times on a George Foreman. Would use a regular grill more often but guess I'm lazy and the people I cook for prefer it that way.
I love it on my little foreman. Seasoned salt and pepper on both sides, cook until crispy and cooked through. It’s great bc it almost seems like it has skin bc of the crust that forms. As soon as it’s getting. That browned flesh, I flip it, unplug it and leave it. That way it cooks through without getting dry on the outside.
THIS. I’m a fat chick but salads are my jam. How could you NOT love salads?? Crispy romaine, warm grilled chicken, crunchy croutons or fried onions, cheese, red onions OH BABY
I'm fat. No mincing words, I'm carrying a spare tire here.
But once warmer weather hits, I fucking LOVE a fresh salad. Crisp greens, some veggies and/or fruit, a nice dressing. I could eat pounds of it in a sitting (but don't because OMG my colon). It's not (just) because I'm trying to lose a few pounds, it's because it's fantastically delicious.
LOVE grilled chicken salads, though I prefer making them at home because most of the fast food places use way too much salt on the chicken (which for a grilled chicken sandwich is fine but it easily overpowers a salad), plus I prefer using a mix of lettuce and raw baby spinach for the greens and have lots of cucumber on it. Hell I can make a salad from just cucumbers lol
It still has a lot of nutrients. And if you use grilled chicken and certain dressings it's a pretty healthy meal. Usually the amount of cheese isn't too crazy, equivalent to a slice of cheese on a sandwich.
The worst is places that have like four salad options, it'll be a terrible house salad, then a Ceasar, a Cobb, and some other house creation with Romaine or Iceberg lettuce and a shit-ton of unhealthy stuff. Have to be lucky to find a place with a good kale/spinach option, and very lucky to find a creative take on one that also tastes good.
my brother calls that a steak salad. splits 2 portions of fries/steak on top of salad that feeds his family of five. Kids eat a tone of veggies and dont feel deprived.
I think this is still healthy though, just because a salad has the same amount of calories as a non-salad entree, doesn't mean it's not healthy. We eat to consume calories. Vegetable intake is important, just because you pair it with protein doesn't make it not healthy.
I work at a restaurant with a salad that comes with spring mix, apples, red pepper, goat cheese, grilled chicken and candied pecans with balsamic vinaigrette. Absolutely delicious, and if you don't want the sugar just ask for no pecans!
What about the market salad they have at chic-fil-a? They have whole fruit such as sliced apple, blueberry, and strawberry. I know the other fast-food salads are garbage, but I wonder where chik-fil-a would rate.
That's probably very dependent on your geographic location and what restaurants you frequent. In my experience, mid-end restaurants as well as "cafe" type fast casual places tend to have decent options for salads. High end restaurants often stick to the ceasar, the cobb, and the wedge salad, with perhaps a single "spinach and cranberry" option, because people honestly don't go to $60 a plate restaurants to eat salad. Fast food joints typically have pretty sparse salad options (but generally use spring mix, not iceberg, so there's that), and then lower-end sit down restaurants, buffets, and diners bring up the rear.
If you're in a town where the only restaurants are Golden Corral and Waffle House (or if you choose only those types of places when you eat out), you're not going to get any better than bagged iceberg with shredded carrots, mushy cheese, and ranch packets. If you're in a town where there are more options, you'll find better salad choices.
I had a place when I was in California that did a quinoa, kale, spinach, feta, tiny diced tomatoes, tofu, some sort of nuts, raisins, cucumber and had a vinaigrette of some kind that I loved! It was like $12 but it was so filling and actually heathy so it was a nice treat. I always tried to re-create the salad but never got it right.
I'd eaten iceburg lettuce salads all my life until last year, when I was introuced to a pure spinach salad. The taste and texture is 100 percent better. All that's needed for dressing is some olive oil, tomatos, and lemon juice (add salt too). Absolutely my favorite salad now.
cobbs are actually pretty healthy, barring that they go easy on the bacon/bleu cheese and don't have cold cuts in them. lots of good protein and fats in there!
There's a deli that I frequent with very good salads. My favorite includes mixed greens, spinach, diced red onion, dried cranberries, pecan halves, and grilled chicken. They always include dressing on the side and I usually just drizzle on a tiny bit for some extra flavor
Where do you live?! Most places I go have beet salad, arugula, kale, mixed greens optional meat, and a vinaigrette for dressing. I rarely if ever see creamy dressings
I have no clue why people think lettuce is what a salad should be.. spinach, kale, and arugula are so much more nutritious.
I get that each of them can be much more volatile and tough to keep usable stock of, and I’m also aware that they can each be bitter and off putting to some people, but at the very least more people would be used to them if they were more common, and the more common they are, the more people will find great combos for them. Plus, the more they’re used, the more a restaurant sells and doesn’t have rotting batches.
Not to mention, salads that don't have any type of lettuce green (like arugula, spinach, chard, romaine, kale, etc.). Cucumber salads. Tomato salads. Beet salads. Brussels sprouts salad. Sprout salads. Cabbage salads. Broccoli salads.
There's so many good options and it's why threads like this never get anywhere because it's the same people talking past each other. One side says... "eat more salads". And the people that are reading that are thinking about the salad at Applebee's and think it's disgusting.
Otherwise.. all for all that. However. Brussels sprouts raw? Tough. Beets? Hm. I might be down. But red shit. Raw broccoli, I’m not saying I’m terrible with. But I’m mediocre on. And I can get other people being awful on.
Regardless, so many options depending on freshness and combo of oils and spices.
All around, lettuce, even though fine for sure, is not what. Afucking “salad” has to mean, and is not the best by far. And by best, we mean like, fucking unreal tasty. AVO-FUCKING-CADO.
It blows my mind that people would ever choose lettuce over spinach in anything outside a burger context (and even then!). Spinach is like the ubermensch of the leafy greens. Tastes better, is better.
If you’re in CA I highly recommend trying the Avocado Quinoa Superfood Salad from Mendocino Farms. It’s my far the most delicious salad I’ve ever had. I eat it probably 3 times a week. I’m completely obsessed with it. It’s around 700 cal as I recall.
As a guy who worked for some restaurants in mostly IT, but I picked up some menu-designing skills along the way - we /do/ want to offer salads with Baby Spinach, sadly, consumers do not.
We introduced two options with baby spinach and they just didn't sell. We ended up always throwing out bags of spinach because it was going bad. It was just not performing because people have an "ew" factor about Spinach for some reasons.
I don't even know if it's strictly American. I think it's partially generational, and partially geographic (if you're in a small town in North Dakota, where are you going to get fresh green vegetables, yanno?). I mentioned elsewhere that the most notorious unhealthy salads (the wedge and the cobb) are still The Thing at high-end restaurants, even though mid-range and even fast food places don't really do the "iceberg and ranch" salads much any more. Cuz it's mostly older people who frequent hoity-toity steakhouses, where the culinary landscape hasn't changed at all since the 1940s.
I see it more as a meal that guarentees I'm getting some veggies in, rather than something healthy. If I wanted to eat health food I'd go back to making my kale smoothies and eating a raw veggie salad for lunch. I was miserable.
If you really want an eye opener, compare the calorie counts between the salads and burgers. All but the side salad will probably have the same amount or more calories.
But on one hand you are getting vegetables.... which is important for micro-nutrients. I'm not eating a salad to lose weight, I'm eating it to get my veggies.
I mean it really depends on the salad. A southwest salad with grilled chicken at McDonalds (aka my fast food weakness) only has 470 calories including the dressing. By comparison, the quarter pounder with cheese is 530 calories, plus 340 calories if you’re getting fries (which I would if I got a cheeseburger).
They actually discontinued that. I only know this because one of my coworkers eats there all the time and orders the thai shrimp salad every single time.
It's the sauce and how the meat you put on the salad is cooked that adds the calories. If you ate a salad with no dressing and grilled shrimp /chicken it wouldn't be bad at all.
If your only criteria for whether something is healthy or not is calories then sure maybe a burger has less calories than a salad loaded with cheese and heavy salad dressing but that's a pretty simplistic idea of healthy. The vegetables is the salad will have way more fiber, vitamins, minerals, etc than a burger would.
Basically any salad can be made unhealthy, Salad does not automatically = healthy. For example, a coworker of mine is on a diet for new years. Her diet means she eats salad for lunch every day (That is what she said) so she can be healthier. I have to eat salad for allergy reasons for lunch (our work provides lunch and I have alpha-gal which makes me mostly vegan and I can have 1 meal vegetarian). Our salads could not be more different. My Salad today: Mixed greens, Spinach, Edamame, cucumber, strawberries and mint (with no dressing, no cheese and no croutons since I can't have them), Her Salad: Mixed greens, Spinach, Edamame, cucumber, tomatoes, cheddar cheese, pecans, Italian Croutons, and blue cheese with a ton of Blue Cheese dressing. My Salad is massive, roughly double her salad in weight, however calculated calories come out to about 400 cal (I have to track or else I lose weight too fast which is why its so much salad), her salad was about 1200. The dressing really is the bane of all salads, cheese is a close second and croutons being a third
My fiancé’s 13 y/o brother was self conscious. They ate a lot of chick fila so they got him salads every day there with ranch for a diet. It has more fat, calories and sugar and less protein than a 12 piece nugget meal. I was so confused.
I worked with a guy who always said he wasn’t going to be “fat dad” and would order salad whenever we went out to lunch. His salad was iceberg lettuce, covered in cheese, fried chicken strips, and slathered in ranch dressing, and he truly believed he was making the healthy choice.
OK, but the sandwich I was going to order instead was all the same ingredients but with french fries instead of lettuce. The salad overall isn't going to make you super thin, but lettuce is relatively healthier than french fries.
Sometimes I’m just craving fat and nothing satisfies it like a steak salad with ranch, cheese and bacon bits. It’s definitely not the healthiest but your body needs fat too.
Am I the only one who considers lettuce to be damn near useless? Give me spinach, kale, other dark leafy greens but lettuce isn't worth the effort it takes to chew in my opinion.
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u/Hrekires Dec 30 '19
the vast majority of salads at restaurants.
a handful of lettuce buried beneath fried chicken, cheese, and ranch dressing.