If you're big on salad, don't think about using fat free dressing for it because you're doing it all wrong. Scientists say you need to eat salad with fat based dressings to get the most out of the veggies and having no fat in your salad actually diminishes the benefit of eating vegetables.

Sounds counter-productive, but even though fat free dressing has less calories than its fatty filled counterpart, you won't be getting the full benefits when eating vegetables with skinny dressings.

The research was done over at Purdue University where scientists compared salad eating with dressing that had saturated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat at three, eight and twenty grams of fat to find which was most effective and discovered that fat is a good thing.
Salads with dressing made with monounsaturated fat (olive and canola oil) were easily the most effective, needing the least amount of dressing to get the most amount of health-promoting carotenoids (carotenoids act as antioxidants in our bodies).

Carotenoids are found in eating plant foods like vegetables and fruits and we want to get our bang for the buck when chomping them down.

[Molecular Nutrition & Food Research via The Atlantic,