Let’s be honest — everybody loves mayonnaise.
If you leave mayonnaise, a spoon, and a human being alone in one room, only years of willpower training will stop that person from absolutely demolishing the mayo straight from the jar.
It’s like fries — evolutionarily speaking, it’s simply the best.
But nowadays, those extra kilos and diseases don’t come out of nowhere. That’s the heavy karma of stuffing yourself with mayonnaise.
There are many dishes—especially salads and cold sauces—where removing mayonnaise is a poor idea.
One of the basic rules you need to remember when cooking anything is:
Fat carries flavor.
And in salads, it’s also crucial for letting the flavors properly “come together.”
That’s why those “fitness” recipes replacing mayonnaise with 0% fat yogurt are an even worse idea than alcohol-free beer. Maybe you can fool the cerebral cortex that way, but not the older parts of the brain responsible for pleasure and taste.
Because what’s needed here is, as the Buddha taught, the middle way.
So when making a salad or even a sauce containing mayonnaise, replace about half of the mayo with a good-quality yogurt.
You keep the key role of the mayonnaise, the right texture, the flavors still blend properly, and there’s a smaller chance an early heart attack will kill you. Your body will thank you for making smarter choices.
I know what I’m talking about. At my peak, I weighed 96 kg. Now I’m at 83, and I can walk 30 kilometers in a single day. And I’m almost 60 years old.
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.