How to make a healthy salad | Nourishable Raw Episode 3

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Hosting & Post-Production by Lara Hyde, PhD

Music & Video Production by Robbie Hyde

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References

Over the years of eating a giant meal-sized salad for lunch everyday, I’ve come up with a structure to construct a healthy salad. I’m going to share this structure with you today. First you need a base. I like to start with a base of greens. Today I’m using an mesclun mix, but it really can be any kind of green mixture like baby spinach, shredded kale, arugula. Aim for about 2 cups, or 2 big handfuls. Next are the toppings. I tend to divide my toppings into 5 categories: whole grains, fruits and veg, protein, garnishes and dressing. Today for my grains I’m using a ½ cup of farro, a whole grain with a delicious nutty flavour. There are many other options too that you can swap in, like barley, or if you’re gluten free you can use wild rice or quinoa. Whole grains pack in lots of fiber which helps you reach that 30g fiber recommendation per day. All this fiber helps nourish your gut microbiome. Usually I’ll cook up a pot of some kind of whole grain and store it in the fridge so that it is really quick to added to salad, and I’ll try to switch up that whole grain from week to week. Next category are fruits and vegetables. You can get really creative here. Today I’m using half a cup of grated carrots. I bought a big bag of carrots and grated a bunch of them at home and stuck them in my fridge so I can add them to my salads for the next few days. You can also purchased pregrated carrots at the grocery store, or slice up carrots yourself. I have one medium apple sliced up with the skin on. I really like mixing fruits and veg together to get some sweetness without the added sugars. Lots of the healthy fiber is contained in the skin, so make sure to keep that apple skin on! The same goes for other fruit as well as nuts. For some nice crunch I’ve chopped up a stick of celery. Next category is protein. Today I’m adding a hard boiled egg. Usually I’ll hard boil a bunch of eggs at once and store them in the fridge so that they’re quick to add to a salad. Ofcourse there are many other options for protein, like chopped up chicken breast, salmon, legumes or nuts. Next category are garnishes. Today I’m adding a quarter cup of roasted unsalted pumpkin seeds.
I love the crunch and they’re a great source fiber, protein and both mono- and polyunsaturated fat.
Other garnishes could be an ounce of cheese like feta or cheddar.
Last, dressing. Lots of commercial salad dressings have hidden added sugars in them, so I tend to opt for making a super simple homemade vinaigrette of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The olive oil is a source of healthy monounsaturated fat and the balsamic vinegar gives it a nice bite. This salad has a nice diversity of nutrient-dense food. This diversity provides a wide array of vitamins and phytonutrients, aka other plant chemicals that aren’t vitamins, like antioxidants, plus the diversity offers many different kinds of fiber to help nourish a diverse gut microbiome.
The thing I love about working with this structure is that it is modifiable depending on your tastes, the seasons and what you have available in your fridge. You can also think about this structure when grocery shopping to make sure that you’re stocked up for the week with ingredients that you can easily mix and match. I tend to prep a bunch of particular ingredients at once so that it is really quick to toss them together into a salad. In the words of Julia Child, Bon appetit!

[lexieandcece]

Your salad looks delicious. My comment is that this is a very large salad for one serving. I am a very large woman and I could not eat half of that. I also don't eat animal products or oils, still, I am overweight. It amazes me that you are so slender being able to consume this