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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

I was actually just lamenting how difficult it is to get a "real" (no lettuce) salad this evening.

Making them at home isn't /really/ an option for me, not unless I want to eat it literally every day. The greens would go bad in about half a week; the other semi-perishable things would need to go shortly after.

It's so much easier to go out and get something fresh and variety from a common kitchen (restaurant) that services many others all day.

However, because carbs are cheap, and because meat is popular, those are the two things every restaurant has a focus and spin on.

Eating healthy is too expensive.

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You can get single-serve fruit salad cups without any lettuce.

When people say “salad” they don’t mean fruit salad, and I think you know that. Salad almost always means something with lettuce and other kinds of raw vegetables, sometimes with sprinklings of other things in there.

Yes, I'm sure bits of pineapple, grape and cherry floating in sugary syrup works just fine compared to a good salad.

I like fruit salad just fine, but I would consider it more of a dessert.

Why don’t “real” salads include lettuce?

Because lettuce is filler whose main purpose seems to be to take up space on the plate. It doesn't provide an saity, and something like iceburg lettuce has very low nutritional content. It just a cop out for restaurants.

Why would it be just filler? You're probably not eating enough. It has high fiber content, just like most vegetables (and actually a very similar macro nutrient ratio)

This is misinformed. Iceberg lettuce contains very little fiber, either.

Lettuce is mostly water. Romani lettuce is a bit better but still bad. Out of leafy greens: spinach, beet greens, nettle, rucola and cabbages (everything Brassica spp.)- are decent nutritionally, a few others in small doses too.

100%. My go-to saying is “lettuce is for rabbits”. And I opt out of lettuce on anything I can.

Aren't vegetables and thus salads mostly carbs, though?

In terms of chemical composition, yes, but mostly carbs that humans can't effectively digest, so nutritionally, they would be considered low-carb.

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