Ya know I’m getting tired of all the misinformation being circulated about food and it’s time to take a look at one such bit of information. Ranch Dressing. I love Ranch dressing. I love it on sandwiches, salads and hamburgers. I love to dip vegetables in it and use it on pizzas. I also hear all the time from so-called nutrition experts and doctors to stay away from the creamy dressings for your salads and use an olive oil/vinagrette dressing instead. So I decided to take a closer look at both of these to see what is really going on nutrition-wise:

Lets compare 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil with 1 tablespoon of regular Lighthouse Ranch dressing.

The olive oil has 120 calories and the Ranch dressing has 60 calories. Interesting. Each of them is made up from primarily fat calories with olive oil being 100% and the Ranch about 90%. The other 10% are sugar sources from dairy and maltodextrin. So lets take a closer look at the fats in these 2 products since we know that olive oil is almost all the ‘good’ fat we always hear so much about. The Ranch dressing must be mostly saturated fat right? WRONG.

1 tablespoon of Ranch has 6 grams of fat, and only 0.5 of that is saturated fat. 1 tablespoon of the olive oil has 14 grams of fat, 2 of which are saturated. That means 14% of the olive oil is saturated fat and 8% of the fat in the Ranch is saturated. Neither has any trans fat by the way.

So in the end I can put double the amount of Ranch dressing on my salad as I can olive oil and still get less saturated fat and about equal the number of calories. If I put 4 tablespoons of Ranch dressing on my salad I’m also getting 4 grams of carbs which equals 16 calories. WOW. I think my heart is going to explode with all this unhealthy stuff going through my system.

Just in case Lighthouse isn’t reflective of standard common Ranch dressings on the market I decided to check the most common brand I could determine which was Hidden Valley Ranch. The numbers are very similar but the Hidden Valley has about 17% of its fat being saturated which is only slightly higher than olive oil but still nowhere near the runaway health hazard that the media and experts would have us believe.