7 Salads to Add Veggies to Your Diet

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Eating veggies is your insurance policy for good health, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that only 26.6 percent of Americans are eating three servings of vegetables a day.

Great tasting salads are a way to boost your intake. I don't know about you, but salads always taste better to me when someone else makes them. Maybe it's because they can be so labor-intensive, with all the shopping and chopping that goes into preparing them.

Here's the good news: simple salads taste just as good as ones that include everything but the kitchen sink. And, by adding some protein, you can turn that simple salad into a meal.

These simple salads of greens plus three ingredients will come together in a snap and take you around the world and back with ease.

• All American: leaf lettuce + cheddar cheese, grape tomatoes, croutons
• Asian: Bibb lettuce + chicken, green onions, snow peas
• French: spinach + hardboiled egg, green beans, red onion
• Greek: romaine lettuce + feta cheese, Kalamata olives, cucumber
• Italian: spring mix + mozzarella cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts
• Middle Eastern: cilantro + garbanzo beans, brown rice, shredded carrots
• South of the Border: lettuce of choice + chicken, avocado, black olives

Here is a shopping list that gives you a week's worth of main-course salads.

Round the World Salad Shopping List

Dairy: eggs, cheddar, feta, mozzarella
Produce: avocado, Bibb lettuce, carrots, cilantro, cucumber, green onions, leaf lettuce, red onion, romaine lettuce, spring mix, snow peas
Proteins: chicken, garbanzo beans
Other: artichoke hearts, black olives, brown rice, Kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes

Healthy Bites appears on MyHealthNewsDaily on Wednesdays. Deborah Herlax Enos is a certified nutritionist and a health coach and weight loss expert in the Seattle area with more than 20 years of experience. Read more tips on her blog, Health in a Hurry!

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