Commercially prepared ranch dressings and hidden carbs

Teri and I had dinner at a local Mexican restaurant the other night, and she ordered a chicken salad with Ranch dressing, which we shared.

Teri used only a small amount of the Ranch dressing on the salad, but I noticed it had a detectable sweetness to it. Then I remembered that most Ranch dressings have added sugar as one of the ingredients.

It's funny, but now that we've switched from prepared mayonnaise and salad dressings to homemade, we can now taste the added sugar in products we once consumed on a regular basis–products that we'd never before perceived as having a sweet taste!

The moral of the story: read your ingredients lists, folks!

Too many prepared foods have added sugar and even though the caloric load of the sugar may be low in the individual servings, the cumulative effect can have a negative impact on your weight loss and health goals.

Another interesting point: You don't realize how we've grown accustomed to the added sugars in our daily diet, until you start to eliminate them.