And the winner goes to Haagen-Dazs vanilla.

Most ice creams have some sort of weird ingredients in it including “vegetable fats” or some other ingredient indicating it could have PUFAs. Even if I don’t really want to worry about it as generally most ice creams are high in saturated fat, the ratios of fat to carbohydrates don’t quite match up. If I don’t want a “low carbohydrate” ice cream then really I am looking for a “real” ice cream. And that real ice cream is Haagan Dazs.

I’m not that huge a vanilla fan, but the other flavours have higher amounts of carbohydrates or ingredients which are a bit more suspect. So if I don’t want to go to the bother of making my own ice cream and I want an ice cream I can buy from either Coles or Woolworths then this is the ice cream.

As a reminder on how to read labels, the way I have been doing it is:

Scan the ingredients list. Do not pass go if it has any of the following:

• Vegetable oil
• Vegetable fat
• Soya oil (soy oil)
• Corn oil
• Safflower oil
• Sunflower oil
• Grape seed oil

I never remember them all off the top of my head but basically if it’s not “olive oil” (Brad says no if you are fat that this is likely not good for you!) or a saturated fat it’s pretty much off the list. Dr Cate has more info on her site about the “Hateful Eight” and a bit more about PUFAs. Keep in mind she includes Walnut Oil in the OK list which from what I understand it is high in PUFAs.

Then I look at the nutrition panel. I am looking for Fats >= Carbohydrates. And Saturated Fat to be 1/2 or more of the total Fat.

As you can see from the panel above Carbs is 15.8 and Fat is 13.4 and so it’s still not ideal but it’s great for what I consider real ice cream. All the other ice creams I’ve looked at (other than low carb ones!), the ratio of carbohydrates to fat is higher than this panel.