Meet the Four Condiments That Will Ruin Your Diet

A vegetable salad is a wonderful thing. The problem begins when we refuse to enjoy the original taste of the vegetables and seek out upgrades that do not necessarily align with our goal to shed the extra pounds at any cost.

Many diets integrate an array of dressings in their salad recipes, claiming they won't negatively impact your diet. The truth? That's a significant falsehood, but diet marketers probably bank on the fact that the quantities you'll use will be minimal and therefore won't hinder your weight loss process.

So, here's where the problem lies.

Dressings like ketchup, mayonnaise, barbecue sauce, tartar sauce, and other 'salad dressings'—which claim to represent a healthy picture if not used excessively—are still considered unhealthy by themselves.

Ketchup, for example, is indeed made from tomatoes, which contain lycopene—known to reduce the risk of heart disease and various cancers, but we must not forget the astronomical amount of sugar added to it, as well as corn syrup, composed of glucose and used as a basic additive in processed foods.

The same goes for mayonnaise (both regular and low-fat). One of the primary and more 'notorious' ingredients in mayonnaise is processed soybean oil, whose consumption may lead to numerous internal inflammations because it disrupts the natural balance of omega-6 levels in our bodies. 

Third on the list of condiments that will ruin your diet is barbecue sauce—which contains exponentially higher sugar levels and a minimal amount of tomatoes, making it far worse than ketchup.

And last but not least on the 'not in our school' list is any dressing labeled as a 'salad dressing.' It doesn't matter what research you conduct to find the healthy ingredients in such dressings; if it's a salad, it's better to consume it without any additions except for lemon, salt (in moderation), and a bit of pepper. All processed dressings are nothing but concentrated collections of non-quality substances, and prolonged consumption of them may even render them hazardous.