Skip to main content

Ice Creams: The Creams of the Crop



By ConsumerReports.org

Exotic choices such as Boston Cream Pie (Ben & Jerry's), Birthday Party (Blue Bunny), and Amaretto Almond Crunch (Häagen-Dazs) might turn heads, but vanilla and chocolate are still the nation's favorite ice cream flavors. Our trained tasters tried 13 vanillas and 11 chocolates with various amounts of fat.

Seven rated Excellent, and six of those are Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry's; the seventh is Archer Farms Belgian Chocolate (Target).

Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Bean ($1.13 per ½ cup serving) topped the list of vanillas, for having a big dairy and real vanilla taste. It comes at a price, though, in the amount of 270 calories and 17 grams of fat per serving. Ben & Jerry's Vanilla ($0.97 per serving) and Häagen-Dazs Five Vanilla Bean ($1.13 per serving) took the other vanilla top spots. Ben & Jerry's has 230 calories and 14 grams of fat, while the Five Vanilla Bean has 220 calories and 11 grams of fat.

Among the Excellent chocolates, testers found that Archer Farms Belgian ($0.33 per serving) has an intense, complex chocolate flavor enhanced by bits of dark chocolate. It has 230 calories and 14 grams of fat per serving. Häagen-Dazs Five Milk Chocolate ($1.11 per serving) has 220 calories and 12 grams of fat, while Haagen-Dazs regular chocolate ($1.16 per serving) has 260 categories and 17 grams of fat. Ben & Jerry's ($1.02) has a strong chocolate flavor but is a touch icy, according to testers, and has 250 calories and 14 grams of fat.

Lower-rated ice creams are less creamy and less flavorful, with flaws such as an artificial taste or gumminess. It seems to be harder to make a high-quality vanilla ice cream than a high-quality chocolate. The chocolate flavor might help mask mistakes.

The tastiness of the top-rated products comes at a cost — they're full of calories and fat. And most are pretty pricey, 97 cents to $1.16 per half-cup serving. But Archer Farms costs 33 cents per serving.

Bottom line
For a special treat, try one of the top-rated ice creams. If more healthful fare is your goal, and anything cold and sweet will do, try a light or fat-free ice cream, which has far fewer calories and less fat.

Häagen-Dazs Vanilla Bean ($1.13 per ½ cup serving) topped the list of vanillas, for having a big dairy and real vanilla taste. It comes at a price, though, in the amount of 270 calories and 17 grams of fat per serving. Ben & Jerry's Vanilla ($0.97 per serving) and Häagen-Dazs Five Vanilla Bean ($1.13 per serving) took the other vanilla top spots. Ben & Jerry's has 230 calories and 14 grams of fat, while the Five Vanilla Bean has 220 calories and 11 grams of fat.

Among the Excellent chocolates, testers found that Archer Farms Belgian ($0.33 per serving) has an intense, complex chocolate flavor enhanced by bits of dark chocolate. It has 230 calories and 14 grams of fat per serving. Häagen-Dazs Five Milk Chocolate ($1.11 per serving) has 220 calories and 12 grams of fat, while Haagen-Dazs regular chocolate ($1.16 per serving) has 260 categories and 17 grams of fat. Ben & Jerry's ($1.02) has a strong chocolate flavor but is a touch icy, according to testers, and has 250 calories and 14 grams of fat.

Lower-rated ice creams are less creamy and less flavorful, with flaws such as an artificial taste or gumminess. It seems to be harder to make a high-quality vanilla ice cream than a high-quality chocolate. The chocolate flavor might help mask mistakes.

The tastiness of the top-rated products comes at a cost — they're full of calories and fat. And most are pretty pricey, 97 cents to $1.16 per half-cup serving. But Archer Farms costs 33 cents per serving.

Bottom line
For a special treat, try one of the top-rated ice creams. If more healthful fare is your goal, and anything cold and sweet will do, try a light or fat-free ice cream, which has far fewer calories and less fat.

Copyright © 2006-2010 Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. No reproduction, in whole or in part, without written permission.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Olympic Diet of Michael Phelps!

By Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD WebMD Health News Questions and answers about the high-calorie diet that fuels the Olympic swimmer's championship performance. Aug. 13, 2008 -- His body may resemble the trim, athletic figure of Michelangelo's statue of David, but the diet of Michael Phelps sure doesn't sound like the stuff of champions. The U.S. Olympic swimmer told ESPN that he eats roughly 8,000-10,000 calories a day, including "lots of pizza and pasta." In addition to stuffing down carbs, he's said that he routinely eats foods like fried egg sandwiches. So exactly how do all those calories help fuel the most decorated Olympic athlete in history? Here are some questions and answers about the Michael Phelps diet. How can Michael Phelps eat 10,000 calories a day and still be so lean? There is no doubt he packs away a ton of food, but it is unlikely that he actually eats that many calories a day, an expert believes. University of Pittsburgh Director of Sports...
Post a Comment
Read more

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...
Post a Comment
Read more