FROZEN DESSERTS-DECEPTIVELY DELICIOUS:
I hate being misled and as a consumer whether I am buying an item like a shirt, a cream or anything else in this world, I always have an aspiration to know if the thing deserves the money’s worth. Same goes for the food and I felt pretty much ballistic when I got a packet of ice cream and in a very discreet corner, I saw the label (Frozen dessert) and felt myself and the masses greatly misled and unsounded.
It is a very painful truth but we Pakistanis being boneheaded have been consuming frozen desserts considering them as ice creams for a very long time. Many renowned companies have played with our minds over the years through their mesmerizing advertisements and people then are easily trapped inside their marvelous series of lies. For some of you who don’t know that about 15 or 20 years ago from now an ice cream brand named as “Yummy ice cream” had issued a case against a renowned and so called an ice cream manufacture company in Pakistan’s Supreme Court, claiming that the company had been selling frozen desserts as ice creams and later on Yummy ice cream won the case and the court ordered the sued company to label their products as Frozen Desserts.
Now after that we have read the history let’s get straight to the point. The big difference between a frozen dessert and an ice cream is this. Frozen desserts contain vegetable fat while ice creams contain dairy fats. Now further differences are as:
Difference in label:
Ice cream:
It claims as ice cream on top of the carton.
Ingredients: Water, milk, sugar, permitted stabilizing and emulsifying agents, artificial flavors and food colors.
Frozen Dessert:
Claims as Creamy Delights in a larger font at the front and on the corner side of the box say Frozen Dessert.
Ingredients: Water, sugar, vegetable fat, whey powder, glucose powder, artificial flavors and food colors, skimmed milk, stabilizers and emulsifiers.
Looking at the ingredients both brands are correct but as long as they are not trying to camouflage themselves as ice cream which they actually are at the moment.
Caloric Differences:
Ice cream:
For every 100 gm serving
Energy: 217 K cal
Protein: 3.5gm
Carbohydrate: 21.5gm
Fat: 13gm
Calcium: 176 mg
Frozen Dessert:
For every 100 gm serving
Energy: 200Kcal
Protein: 4gm
Carbohydrate: 23gm
Fat: 10.5gm
Saturated Fat: 5.8 gm
Traces of Trans-fats
Analysis:
At first when discussing the ingredients let’s talk about the Ice Cream and as FDA says that an Ice Cream should contain at least 10% milk fats. On the contrary a Frozen Dessert does not contain any milk at all. When once in a blue moon if a consumer looks at the labeling of the Frozen Dessert he would find an ingredient named as skimmed milk. Now many people confuse it with cream milk. They should know that the two of them are not similar at all and have a different effect on our health. Particularly skimmed milk is the milk from which the cream has been separated and so are the vitamins (A, D, E and K). This is because the vitamins have been skimmed alongside with the fat during the process. So it would not be wrong to say that cream milk is better for our health.
Further on it can be seen that the Frozen Desserts contain vegetable fat instead of milk fat. The source of vegetable fats comes from vegetable oils such as soybean oil, sunflower oil, corn oil etc. Even though these aren’t really vegetables. These oils contain some essential fatty acids and Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids which are good for our health and if taken in excess then are harmful (This does not apply to healthy plant oils like olive oil or coconut oil which are extremely good for you). But the companies never mention the amount of vegetable fats they are adding in the product and observing the increased ratio of health risks one can always assume the quantity to be high and it has the following disadvantages on the human body:
· Vegetable fats contribute to inflammation which then contributes towards various diseases including Cardio Vascular Diseases (CVD), depression or even cancer. I would like to make a point here that some studies show that polyunsaturated fats reduce the risk of CVD but the problem is that they don’t make a distinction between Omega-6s and Omega-3s which is very crucial.
· Vegetable oils are loaded with trans-fats which are highly toxic and increase the risk of various diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity. They are so bad that governments around the world have started to take a prompt action against food companies to reduce their amount and have set rules.
· Vegetable oil consumption is associated with various other diseases such as severe depression, increased homicide rates, also asthma and eczema in children.
On contradiction to it the ice creams can provide good amount of nutrients, vitamins and most importantly calcium. According to the newest diet featured in prevention magazine, you can lose weight and eat ice cream once a day too. The secret of this diet lies in calcium as experts describe the reason that when your body does not get calcium, then it triggers fat cells to store more fat and swell.
Wrapping it all up I would like to add up to the deceased minds of our people especially mothers, that they should never reckon frozen desserts as an alternative source of milk for their children which may lead to hazardous results on the health of our future generations and therefore they should not be considered as coequal in any means. It is now finally the time that we looked carefully at our labels. It is time that consumers read between the lines because deception may give us what we want for the present, but it will always take it away in the end.
_Syed Hamza Ali
The writer is a solicitous undergraduate student at University of Karachi in the field of Food Science and Technology who firmly believes to provide the world with some promising healthcare solutions for the sustenance of a healthy life which we all deserve or tend to achieve.