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Originally Posted by xpinkglowx2
but how does mixing it with milk help with calories or fat, or being more healthy?
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It dilutes the dressing it so it goes further (covers more salad per calorie), and the more milk you use, it reduces the calorie count that much more "per tablespoon." For example, if you make ranch dressing using just mayo - it's about 100 calories per tablespoon. However, skim milk is about 5 calories per tablespoon, and whole milk still has less than 10 calories per tablespoon, so if you make ranch dressing with half milk or buttermilk, you cut the calories nearly in half - and if you use a 50 calorie mayonaise and skim or low fat buttermilk, you've brought the calories down to under 30 calories per tablesoon. I use Hellman's canola or olive oil mayonaise to make my creamy salad dressings (they both have only 50 calories per tablespoon, half the calories of regular mayo, but I think the taste is much closer to "regular" mayos than most lite versions).
"Dilution" is one of my main weight loss food tricks. I use it in all sorts of ways. By combining lower calorie foods to extend higher calorie foods, you reduce the overall calorie or fat count.
For example, I "dilute" browned ground beef with tvp. TVP (textured vegetable protein - also called TSP, textured soy protein). It makes a good ground beef substitute and is much lower in fat (nearly fat free) and much fewr calories per ounce than ground beef (or any ground meats)- but it also has very little flavor of it's own, and not everyone likes the texture. I like it, but don't love it. My husband hates it - so I found a way to make us both happy and combine ground beef and tvp to make "ground beef" with the calorie and fat content of the more expensive lean meats like ground chicken (which is expensive and hard to find), turkey (which neither of us care for don't like) or beef (which is expensive, and tends to be dry, where the tvp really holds moisture well). It also helps me save money, because tvp is about 1/4 the cost of cheap ground beef, and I can combine it with cheap, fatty ground beef (70 -80% lean). So I can buy "cheap" ground beef and tvp and make a mixture that is nutritionally more similar to the very expensive 90% or leaner ground meats for less than the price of the cheapest hamburger.
When I have a taste for something that's calorie-dense, I dilute it in other ways too. Like when I had a taste for fast food fried chicken - I bought a box of popcorn chicken and poured it over a large plate of lettuce with my diluted buttermilk dressing. I've done the same making a huge "taco salad" by crumbling one Taco Bell taco over a large plate of lettuce with a mixture of salsa and fat free sour cream as it's dressing. I was just as satisfied with my taco salad (300 calories) as my husband was with his 4 tacos (720 calories).