Top 10 Best Healthy Salad Dressings in 2021 (Annie's Naturals, Primal Kitchen, and More)

Introducing Our Expert

Sangeeta Pradhan is a registered dietitian and a certified diabetes educator. It's her job to delve into the complexities of nutrition and distill it into easily digestible information for the public. It's also something she loves doing. 

That's one of the reasons she started her blog, the Web Dietitian. It's a little corner of the internet where nutrition is presented plainly and frankly, with assertions that are backed by research and a simple desire to help. You can expect lovely writing and apt metaphors, as well as some great recipes to round everything out.

According to the AHA, more than 70% of the sodium we consume comes from packaged, prepared, and restaurant foods. Sodium makes your body hold on to water. As more blood flows though your blood vessels, blood pressure increases. 

You can get something called edema—water retention—and what that means is your heart, which is pumping blood throughout your body, now has a higher blood volume to contend with. So it has to work harder to pump that extra fluid, and if unchecked, it can lead to congestive heart failure. 

Your heart’s a muscle, and when you overwork a muscle, it gets larger, so you can end up with something called cardiomyopathy. Overall, it is very important that we watch the sodium in our diet, even for the average consumer. 

The US Dietary guidelines advise limiting intake to 2300 milligrams per day for the average adult and 1500 milligrams per day to those with HTN (hypertension) and pre-HTN (pre-hypertension).

The AMDR (acceptable macronutrient distribution range) supported by the Dietary Guidelines propose 20 to 35% of your total calories should come from fat, which is about 45 to 67 grams per day on a 2000 calorie diet .

You definitely want to avoid saturated fats and hydrogenated vegetable oils, also known as trans fats, which are slowly being phased out of the food supply as per FDA guidelines. But the key takeaway is this: you want to replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats, either mono- or polyunsaturated fats, and not refined carbohydrates. 

You want to make sure that there is a moderate amount of fat at every meal, and that includes some healthy fats in your salad dressing as well. Fat carries flavor and promotes satiety. You need fat for the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins. All kinds of hormones are made from fat. You absolutely need it as part of a healthy diet. 

I would suggest limiting saturated fat intake to 1.5 to 2 grams per serving, while watching the actual number of servings as well. The US Dietary Guidelines recommend limiting saturated fat intake to around 10% a day, while the AHA recommends even lower intakes of 7% a day and 5 to 6% of total calories—or 11 to 13 grams—per day on a 2000 calorie diet for people who need to lower their cholesterol.

There’s definitely a case to be made for including both MUFAs and PUFAs—i.e. omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids—in your diet. There is some evidence linking diets containing MUFAs with favorable changes in weight and body composition in women with obesity.

In addition, MUFAs have been linked to reducing LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and raising HDL cholesterol levels. And they’re found in nuts, seeds, olive, and avocado oil.

But I haven’t seen studies to support whether monos are better or superior than polys, per see, so we want to proceed with a common-sense approach. And that would be to just replace those solid fats with liquid oils, be they mono or poly, or to replace them with whole-plant fats, such as the fats found in nuts, seeds, and avocados. 

We don’t want to just keep focusing on the fatty acids in the diet because, ultimately, it’s not isolated nutrients that matter. It’s whole foods and whole dietary patterns that count. So, every so often, I think we just need to take a step back and look at the big picture so that we don’t miss the forest for the trees.

Hexane has been classified as an air pollutant and could adversely affect the nervous system according to the Center for Disease Control. However, the whole process where you use a chemical solvent such as hexane to refine the oil is not supposed to leave a lot of residue.

For this reason, itʼs unclear whether consuming the trace residue long-term is truly a health hazard. Perhaps more studies that also explore dose-dependent effects is required. 

Obviously, an oil that is minimally processed to some extent would be preferred, but the problem with extra virgin olive oil is that its smoke point is really low. So for sautéing, you may want to use the lighter, yellow olive oil which has a higher smoke point, and use the dark green, extra virgin only for cold preparations such as dips and salad dressings. 

In addition, when you buy olive oil at the grocery store, get the one thatʼs at the back of the shelf that hasn’t been exposed to light, keep it in a dark place, away from heat, and make sure itʼs tightly capped. Oxygen, light, and heat can cause oils to spoil quickly.

If you’re having two tablespoons of salad dressing with some artificial ingredients once every two weeks, but the rest of your diet consists of whole and unprocessed foods, that is considered a negligible amount. If your diet is high in processed foods and you are choosing salad dressings with artificial ingredients, you may want to reconsider. 

A general rule of thumb is to try to eat foods that are as close to their original source as possible. We want to bear in mind that industrial processing is relatively new—perhaps 100 to150 years old at best. Before that, our ancestors pulled food out of the ground and from trees. 

While our modern, fast-paced lifestyles would certainly not allow us to slave over a hot stove all day long, there is a strong case that one can make for consuming foods that are whole and minimally processed to optimize one’s nutrient intake.

I love to add fresh, succulent fruits to my salads to make them pop with flavor and give them a refreshing twist. The added acidity in salad dressing gives it a tangy flavor. Honey can also to give it a naturally sweet flavor. 

Fresh fruit can give a regular garden salad a slightly unexpected twist. In addition, it also adds a very important nutrient—vitamin C, an antioxidant, not to mention other phytonutrients.