Summertime in Montana is an amazing time of year. Even with storms and fires, it is a time that emphasizes fun outdoors, camps, travel and lots of fun in the water and the sun. Often, this is a time for barbecues, for family dinners, for get-togethers. Unlike the strict schedules of the school year or the cold early evenings of winter, summer seems to invite some rule relaxation. It is a time when we relax some rules around playtime and bedtime and often dessert time. And when we seek the best dessert for summer, we can never turn away from ice cream. Ice cream seems to be made to be eaten on hot summer days. It can be served in a cup or a cone, as an accompaniment to other treats and desserts or as its own delicious entity. So, ice cream really deserves a say.
Because I am not an ice cream expert, I googled for “10 best ice cream brands in USA” and compiled the following list of the top average hitters: Ben and Jerry’s, Haagen-Dazs, Breyers, Blue Bell, Baskin-Robbins, Tillamook, Friendly’s, Van Leewen, Magnum, Breyer’s, Edy’s. Each of the listed brands curried favor through taste, presence of various added flavors, affordability, consistency, and texture. What I was looking for was something different. I was looking at the ingredient list.
Ben and Jerry’s are a known ice cream brand with many whimsical flavor selections. To simplify matters, I focused on vanilla. Although the company boasts free range eggs and non GMO products, they still add water, guar gum and carrageenan to every vanilla pint. Tillamook with pictures of vanilla bean and flower on the carton adds guar gum, tara gum, natural flavor, citric acid, annatto for color, xanthan gum and locust bean gum to their pints. I looked at the ingredient list for all the listed ice creams. Edy’s advertising slow-churned classic vanilla ice cream lists a long list of ingredients that include corn syrup, polydextrose, soluble corn fiber, mono and diglycerides, carob bean gum, guar gum, natural flavor, annatto color and vitamin A palmitate. In fact, the only brands in the list that had real ice cream ingredients without added preservatives or stabilizers were Haagen-Dazs and Van Leewen. These were also the more expensive brands on the list.
Going through this exercise, makes you pause and think of what other labels one should be reading. And although it may be an ice cream pint for the summer, will it add to much more when these preservatives and stabilizers are in other foods, many other foods that we purchase every day for our families? This brings many other questions on food and health and how in small added ways, what we put in our bodies matters.
As for ice cream, make your own. There is nothing like homemade vanilla ice cream to add to a pie or dollop onto a homemade chocolate chip cookie. All it takes is sugar, vanilla powder, vanilla extract, milk, cream. Mix together either by hand and freeze or splurge and buy an ice cream maker for many more home-made ice cream summers.
Dr. Camilla Petersen is the owner of Petersen Concierge Medical, an innovative concierge practice that focuses on metabolic health and peak human performance, providing bespoke comprehensive wrap-around primary care.
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