With salads off the menu at Chicago-area McDonald’s in 2023, I’ve started looking elsewhere for a fast-food salad that’s not high in fat, salt and sugar. My first stop is Wendy’s, which offers four different salads.
Two of them include main ingredients I don’t eat — the southwest avocado salad (avocado does terrible things to my stomach) and the apple pecan salad (no nuts for me either.) There’s a taco salad too, but beans also don’t do it for me and that one just seems like too much fat and salt from cheese to even consider.
So I tried the fourth, the parmesan Caesar salad which comes with a grilled chicken breast much like McDonald’s once served on its pre-Pandemic salads.
If you order it as described, it has 790 mgs of sodium in the salad itself and another 320 mgs in the dressing. That’s half a day’s sodium consumption for the average person and about all I try to eat because of my heart issues.
So I skipped the dressing, bringing my own oil and vinegar, and I omit the parmesan chips. That gets the sodium down to 650 mgs.
The Wendy’s app does show you real-time nutrition information as you change what you want on your salad, a handy feature.
Fat content for my stripped-down salad is 9 grams, 4.5 grams of that is saturated fat. Not bad. How about taste? I’ve tried it at two different Wendy’s and it has what to me seems like an odd smell. I’m not sure if that’s from what’s put on the chicken.
It’s also not very filling, at only 230 calories. I would buy two McDonald’s salads and combine them to fill up but doing that at Wendy’s would send my salt count too high.
So the search continues.
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 
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