Posted on 08/11/2025 11:15:08 AM PDT by Red Badger
Unless you are in denial, you probably understand that ice cream isn’t a diet food. Although it is delicious and nothing beats a cool, sweet cone of the frozen dessert on a hot summer day, it isn’t going to help you shave inches off your waistline. However, that doesn’t mean all brands are equal regarding health. Some popular brands found at your local grocery store contain artificial ingredients, flavors, and preservatives. Here are 6 ice cream brands that are mostly air and additives.
1. Edy’s
Edy’s ice cream is delicious, but many artificial colors and additives are on the ingredient list. Tara Collingwood, MS, RDN, CSSD, LD/N, ACSM-CPT, a Board Certified Sports Dietitian and co-author of the Flat Belly Cookbook for Dummies, recently told us that the flavors are commonly made with polysorbate 80, carrageenan, and high-fructose corn syrup.
2. Kemps
Kemps is popular and tastes great, but the ingredient list isn’t the best and includes additives, artificial flavoring, and high fructose corn syrup. Guar gum, mono- and diglycerides, and carrageenan are a few of the worst culprits.
3. Great Value
Great Value ice cream at Walmart will definitely save you money, and shoppers maintain it is delicious. However, you might be compromising your health. Collingwood explains that Walmart can sell it for less than most of the competition because they keep costs down with “synthetic colorings, assorted emulsifiers, and titanium dioxide for extra whiteness.”
4. Blue Bunny
Blue Bunny is readily available at most stores across the country. However, the popular ice cream uses additives, artificial flavors, and high fructose corn syrup in its pints. Certain flavors are healthier and made with higher quality ingredients compared to others, so make sure to check the label of the flavor. Vanilla, for example, is made with just milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla.
5. Turkey Hill
Turkey Hill is another big national brand of ice cream that offers a lot of bang for the buck in terms of taste. However, it is made with ingredients similar to Kemps and Blue Bunny: artificial food coloring, cellulose gel, cellulose gum, soybean oil, and mono- and diglycerides, just a few of the names on the ingredients list, which also includes high fructose corn syrup.
6. Blue Ribbon Classics
If you have done any research on ice cream, you probably already know that many of kinds of frozen treats you consider ice cream, actually aren’t. Collingwood points out that Blue Ribbon Classics, a popular grocery store ice cream, is marketed as “frozen dairy desserts” and is “not true ice cream.” Ingredients include dairy milk solids, palm kernel oil, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colors(Yellow 5, Blue 1), and artificial flavors.
Costco vanilla ice cream is quite good.
Not eating a moderate amount of ice cream won’t make you live longer, it will just seem longer.
A few ice cubes, a banana, 1/4 cup yogurt, and your choice of flavorings topped with milk in the blender. Smoothies have weaned me from icecream and sugar.
I guess my go to is Haagen Daz or a seasonal Trader Joe’s ice cream like Pumpkin ice cream.
I try to say away from ice cream which can make me gain weight but sometimes I can’t help it.
It must be the added air that makes so many brands of ice cream these days so “foamy”, for lack of a better word. I like my ice cream dense and slightly icy, and I hate the ones that have a texture just a step above whipped cream.
We really are a nation of Homer Simpsons...............
Hagen Daas for me. I loved Ben&Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch but their political ravings turned me off.
B&J is no longer owned by B&J.............
mostly air and additives
Well, at least you don’t gain weight by the air, right?
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No but from the example of Joe, the air tended to settled in the uppermost part of his body until it displaced what was there....
My sister and her family lived for a while in Carroll County Maryland and there were two sisters down the road from them who sold their own handmade ice cream out of a little roadside shack in the summer. Only three flavors available but that stuff was great!
Titanium?! In ice cream?!
They would probably be shut down by the government today...............
They would probably be shut down by the government today...............
Titanium dioxide is a paint coloring...........
You can tell cheap ice cream by how fast it melts. and you can buy by the weight. We i made ice cream the difference in the better and lesser brands was air. Haagen Daz is the only ice cream i buy.
Check out Blue Bell.
LOL! What's going to kill me? Not ice cream!
Reminds of my buddy's father, smoking is his mid-eighties. He would say 'smoking is not going to kill me (at this point).'
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