10 Best Healthy Salad Dressings in 2022 (Registered Dietitian-Reviewed)

You want to avoid too much sodium in your dressing and choose something with less than 250 milligrams per serving. That’s because in a day, a healthy adult should be ideally consuming 2,300 milligrams, according to The American Heart Association. Too much sodium could potentially lead to high blood pressure.

If you are part of at-risk populations—these include, but are not limited to folks over 50, African-Americans, and people with hypertension, diabetes, or kidney disease—the AHA lowers the cap to 1,500 milligrams (so about 200 milligrams per serving). Around half of the US population falls into this group.

Finally, if you live with children 15 or younger–or if you are one–sodium intake needs to be further limited relative to their energy requirements. But we wouldn’t stress out too much about doing calculations; basically, if your daughter eats half the amount of salad you do, she should also get half the amount of salad dressing.

The American Heart Association says that around 16 grams of saturated fat a day is fine—but eating too much risks high cholesterol and heart disease because saturated fat has a stable chemical structure that stays solid at room temperature, but clogs up your arteries. Ideally, you want just two to four grams of saturated fat per serving.

You also want to steer clear of trans fats. These raise the amount of bad (LDL) cholesterol floating around in your blood and drive out the good stuff (HDL cholesterol). Trans fat has been linked to heart failure, diabetes, inflammation, and other chronic diseases.

There are, however, good unsaturated fats which come with a host of health benefits. You can find them in the oils of most plants. So, look for healthy fats, stick with the suggested serving size, and try to stay within the recommended guidelines for total fat as noted below.

When you hydrogenate a liquid fat, you turn it into a solid fat by adding hydrogen. This keeps the oil from going rancid quickly, but it also unfortunately produces trans fats, which are not good. 

When reading the ingredients label, make sure there is no partially or fully hydrogenated oil. Steer clear of shortening as well, which is made from partially hydrogenated oil.

Instead, look for liquid oils, which are brimming with healthy (unsaturated) fats. They do just the opposite of hydrogenated oils, which means they lower cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. However, there are a lot of theories about nutritional differences between monounsaturated (MUFAs) and polyunsaturated (PUFAs) fats.

Sangeeta wants you to know that you need both MUFAs and PUFAs as part of a healthy diet. As long as you are consuming salad dressing in moderation and all the oils are liquid, you will be taking in a healthy amount of fat, be they mono or poly. Most plant-based oils are full of unsaturated fat, so look out for nut, avocado, peanut, sesame, and olive oil.

Many oils are drawn out chemically using hexane, which is toxic. It’s heated out later, of course, but we aren’t sure how much is left over. And the heating process changes the make up and flavor profile of the oil and might even phase out some nutrients. 

In a nutshell, you’re left with less high-quality, less healthy stuff. If the bottle doesn’t tell you how an oil was harvested, assume it was chemically processed.

Then you’ve got expeller-pressed oils. Here, the fruits or nuts were stuck into a giant machine, which literally squeezed the oil right out of them. But you need a lot of pressure to wring oil from a peanut. So expeller pressing, while better than chemical processing, still generates a lot of heat.

In Europe, cold-pressed oils are oils that haven’t been exposed to any temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. This means no chemical reactions and no flavor changes. In the States, however, we don’t regulate this strictly, so if you want the healthiest stuff possible, look for “expeller-pressed” or “cold-pressed” oils in the ingredients list.

The “extra virgin” you see before olive oils also refers to the extraction process. In a nutshell, “extra virgin” is the purest stuff. It’s got the strongest flavor and keeps the most nutrients and health benefits.