SALAD: THE UNNECESSARY "HEALTH FOOD"

The ritual vegetable, even for many nutritionally sawy Ameri cans, is the side salad. We keep ordering the typical iceberg bet tuce / mealy tomato abomination available everywhere front burger joints and taco houses to Asian restaurants (where a cur of green tea would easily give you more benefits than an Ameri can side salary. We've mistakenly deified this pointless bowl making the salad bar a shrine of health, nutritionally deceptive and comprorriise~ though it is with calorie-laden gelatins, fake bacon and creamy dressings.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a good salad, but we've diverged from the sallet days of our Masonic founders Washing ton, Franklin and Jefferson and the earlier Roman salata dishes that got their names from the Latin noun for salt.

All greens are not created equal. Consider the spectrum, ranging from iceberg through romame to kale. The comparison below is based on analyses from the Nutntion Almanac, fifth edition, by Lavon Durme.) In equal-size servings,

· romaine has about twice the protein of iceberg, and kale has almost four times as much.

· romaine has over seven times as much vitamin A as iceberg, and kale has almost twenty-four times as much.

· romaine has twice iceberg's niacin and calcium, and kale has over five times as much.

· romaine has four times the vitamine C of iceberg, and kale has eighteen times as much.

· additionally, kale has well over twice the level of potassium found in the lettuces. Kale has over three times the calories of lettuce a good thing in vegetables, because it makes you feel full. If you're mindlessly eating lettuce as filler, at least choose the more robust romaine. Make the switch altogether to dark leafy greens, and you will fee the energy boost that mindful, and functional, nutrition can make.