I hear this said a lot, yet I never really hear any explanation. Does it really have no nutritional value? If I feel like being healthy and having an iceberg salad, should I not bother because it’s not going to do anything? What’s wrong with iceberg lettuce?
Well, it certainly has nutritional value. It has some vitamins and fiber. However, according to this (http://www.nutritiondata.com/facts-001-02s01ws.html ) it only has 5 Kcal of energy per 39g serving. Which is roughly 125 calories (lowercase c) per gram. If you consider that fresh out of the fridge your body is going to spend at least 10% of that energy getting the iceberg lettuce to your body temperature, not even talking about chewing or digestion it would be a reasonable guess to say that it has negative caloric content. I.e. it takes more energy to eat than you get from it.
Well, even if it had no nutritional value, that wouldn’t be a reason to abandon eating it. OK, it may not be the tastiest type of lettuce, but it can be aesthetically pleasing in some presentations, plus it can add bulk to a meal - filling you up without excessively piling on the calories.
It is fibrous, and low cal. Fibrous Low cal foods usually are light in vitamins/minerals, but they aid in digestion. Keeping one’s digestive track healthy via fibrous foods is incredibly important. That is nutritional value right there.
The whole point about fiber (which is the biggest component in iceberg lettuce) is that it is not digestible.
If you define “stuff with nutritional value” as only “stuff which your body will absorb and use to build up more body”, then veggies are quite low for nutritional value. All veggies.
But if you define it as “stuff that it’s healthy to eat”, then veggies nutritional value goes way up.
OK, so why not eat something with fiber that also has vitamins and taste? Like, say, almost any vegitable other than iceberg?
The context in which I’ve usually heard that statement is in contrast to other greens – Romaine, for example – which are also fibrous and low calorie but also have some actual vitamins, not to mention taste.
Just pickin’ a nit here…
The units called “calories” in nutrition tables actually are kilocalories. One gram of protein generates approximately 4 (kilo)calories, and one gram of carbohydrate about the same amount. One gram of water, the chief component of iceberg lettuce, has no caloric value at all, but water is still a vital component of a healthy diet.
Water and crunchiness.
IMHO: The nutritional content of all lettuce is low enough that it makes practically no difference healthwise whichever one you eat. Certainly, in a salad, a more flavourful lettuce is preferable. But the excellent texture of iceberg makes it perfect for some applications, like in a BLT for example.
I’d be curious to see sales figures on iceberg lettuce over the last, oh, 50 years or so. When I was a wee twickster, that was what lettuce was – but I’m trying to think of the last time I actually bought a head, and can’t. When I try to visualize the lettuce display at the grocery store, I see an array of the darker greens (and of course that whole long rack of the pre-shredded salads).
Nothing of substance to add to the discussion but I thought I’d throw out a John Waters line; he calls iceberg the “filthy polyester of lettuce.”
Looking for sales figures on lettuce, I find that McDonalds and Taco Bell are both huge consumers – :smack: – so I guess we don’t need to worry about those poor iceberg growers going out of business anytime soon.
I recently discovered that if you order a sandwich, even at Subway, and specify “no lettuce”, you get the same amount of salad without the boring lettuce. I have taken to calling it the waste of space vegetable - only useful if you have nothing else to use to provide bulk.
Iceberg lettuce keeps its crispness better than any other lettuce when shredded or used with hot materials, e.g., BLT sandwiches, tacos, burritos.