What ‘skinny’ recipes, foods really are

It’s time to start saying no to any recipe or product that uses the word “skinny” to describe it.

They’re all over social media. I decided I’d had enough when I saw yet another recipe for “the best” “skinny” salad dressing — with only three ingredients. That’s the other hook of these recipes, a minimum of ingredients. In reality they are maxed out on all the wrong things.

The recipe started out OK, with buttermilk, a real food. Then it went into “light” mayonnaise, which, if you check its nutritional data, you’ll see modified starch high up on the ingredient list. If you are prone to gaining weight, this carbohydrate is not your friend.

Some sort of packaged product is the base of most of these “skinny” recipes, and this one is no exception. The last ingredient in this “skinny” dressing is one of those mixes; I had to drag out my magnifying glass to read its ingredients online, that’s how tiny the type was. Maybe because it’s one fake ingredient after another. None of it sounds like real food.

The promise of course is that by eating these “skinny” concoctions you, too, will become skinny. But what we know from so many experts now, cheap carbs and highly processed food have played a number on so many of our waistlines.

All these skinny recipes and products may be just fine for some people. They will lose or maintain a good weight (though some may very well be thin and end up with metabolic syndrome anyway, as Dr. Robert Lustig explains in “Fat Chance”).

But for so many others, all these purported “skinny” foods have done nothing but made us fat and sometimes sick.

Steer clear of all these “skinny” foods with phony chemistry-class sounding ingredients.

Ditch the skinny; go for fit, healthy. Your body will thank you.

— Sue Ontiveros