If you do one thing this week...get more salad
SO SUMMER in Ireland has been a bit hit and miss this year, but just as we try to make the most of the sun when it shows up, it seems you might also get more of the nutrients in a summer salad by using your salad dressing wisely.
A study at Purdue University looked at how fat levels in dressings affected how 29 people took up plant compounds called carotenoids from salads in experiments.
The findings, published in Molecular Nutrition Food Research, suggest that fat – and particularly the polyunsaturated fat – was linked with better carotenoid absorption.
Of course adding too much fat-laden salad dressing can also send the calories into the stratosphere, so you need to keep an eye on that, but the research echoes previous findings that our bodies take up these plant compounds better when we eat a bit of fat with them too.
