Commercial dressings live inside the ultra-processed food category. An NIH inpatient RCT (Hall et al., Cell Metab 2019) found ultra-processed diets drove +508 kcal/day overconsumption versus matched whole-food meals. A salad smothered in ranch can cross 400 kcal before the greens count.
How should I track Salad Dressing, coleslaw, reduced fat?
With calorie-dense foods like Salad Dressing, coleslaw, reduced fat, a kitchen scale is your best friend. Research shows that portion estimation errors reach 50–200% for fats and oils (Almiron-Roig et al., Appetite 2013) — even a tablespoon off can mean 40–120 extra calories. Weigh on a scale rather than eyeballing — this applies to both liquid oils and solid fats like butter. If you use cooking sprays, note that "0 calorie" labels are per fraction-of-a-second spray — a realistic burst is closer to 5–10 calories, and multiple sprays add up.