Go ahead and eat the ice cream

I saw a commercial this morning for Kellogg's Special K Chocolatey Delight cereal. It was pointing it out as a "healthy alternative" to chocolate ice cream. (I'll use Breyer's Chocolate Ice cream as my specific point of comparison in this post.) Let's look at the facts.

	Cereal	Ice cream
Serving size	3/4 cup	1/2 cup
Calories	160	140
Protein	2g	2g
Fat	2g	7g
Carbs (net)	24g	16g

Now let's look at the first few ingredients of each:

Cereal

rice, whole grain wheat, sugar, chocolatey chunks (sugar, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, cocoa, soy lecithin, artificial flavor, milk), high fructose corn syrup, salt, malt extract...

Ice cream

milk, cream, sugar, cocoa, whey, natural tara gum, natural flavor

So, what do we have here? They're both about the same calories, though the cereal (with milk, since that's how people eat it, and since that's how it's shown in the commercial) is marginally higher. Protein is a wash, and insignificant at that. Fat is higher in the ice cream, but that's fine for me. Carbohydrates are significantly higher in the cereal and, since it's lower in fat, these carbs will hit the blood stream quickly and be converted to fat quite rapidly by the body. This is especially true in the scene depicted in the commercial where the lady is apparently eating the cereal as a late-night substitute for the ice cream.

Now consider the ingredient list. For cereal, it can basically be translated as this: sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar (plus some trans fat), cocoa, sugar, salt, sugar... Amazing. Now for the ice cream: sugar, fat, sugar, cocoa, sugar, gum, flavorings. Neither of these is particularly impressive, though the cereal is much more clearly a manufactured food that isn't handled well by our bodies.

To be clear, I'm not selling this ice cream as a health food. Far from it. But, if given a choice between the two, I would definitely eat the ice cream instead of the cereal because I believe it would have less of a negative effect on my body (and would also be more filling because of the additional fat it contains). So, if the ice cream is calling your name from the freezer, and if you're tempted to substitute the cereal — forget it! Go ahead and eat the ice cream!