12 Steps to Whole Foods

Dressing Up Your Salads
High-Nutrition Ingredients to Use Instead
The best salad oils to use are olive oil and flax oil, as they are highly nutritious, are liquid (unlike coconut oil,
which is solid above 76°), and have flavors that complement raw vegetables. Feel free to experiment with
grape seed and other seed and nut oils as well, also highly nutritious—but buy extra virgin, unprocessed
versions.
Olive oil. Always buy organic, extra virgin—the greenest olive oil you can find. The greener it is, the higher in
antioxidants it is. “Extra virgin” means that the oil is raw and comes from the first pressing of the olives.
Subsequent pressings become more bitter, less nutritious and, more importantly, require more heat processing
to extract.
Flaxseed oil. Flax seed and, in particular, its oil are the richest source of Omega-3 fatty acids of any food.
These “essential fatty acids” are critical building blocks in the human body, and the body cannot manufacture
them from other elements, as with so many other things. Buy flax oil in dark, refrigerated bottles at the health
food store—and always keep it in the fridge, as it breaks down and goes rancid more quickly than other oils.
Sprouts. I add a couple of tablespoons of alfalfa sprouts to many of my salad dressing recipes, simply because
they are the most high-nutrition food on the planet (greens being in second place), and we can easily sneak
them into dressings. We will focus on sprouting and live foods later, in Chapter 7 (page 199). If you have never
sprouted, you can wait until Chapter 7 to start incorporating sprouts into your dressings (or purchase organic
spouts if you can't wait).
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw 12 Steps to Whole Foods 77