HOW DOES THE ICE-CREAM AD MISLEAD YOU?
We know that milk carries a lot of nutritional benefits. We always advise our children to have their daily glass of milk. Recently one leading manufacturer has started marketing it's ice-creams as milk (see photograph of the newspaper advert). Being a nutritionist, I could not digest the claim and did some research on my own. I found the following information about ice-creams and cow milk ( see images of comparison tables).
Comparing the three main food groups( i.e. carbohydrates, proteins and fats), we can see that ice-cream comes nowhere near the goodness of milk. Also, ice-cream contains only Calcium whereas cow milk contains many more vitamins, minerals etc. and also healthy amounts of water.
- Carbs (in terms of sugar): ice cream contains 10.7 gm % as compared to unsugared cow milk at 4.4%. It also explains the difference in calorie content to a large extent (115 cal/100 ml in ice-cream and 67 cal/100 ml in cow milk). Definitely not a good news for weight watchers.
- Fat: ice-cream at 7.1 gm % ( 4.9% saturated fat) compares poorly with low fat milk at 4.1%. Bad news for all.
- Protein: Cow milk is definitely better as it contains 60% more protein than ice-cream (3.2 gm% vs 2 gm%).
- In addition, except Calcium ice-cream does not contain any other vitamin or mineral. Cow milk contains Calcium, Phosphorus, Vitamin B and C and small amounts of Iron.
Thus it appears that the Ice-cream ad is a deliberate attempt to mislead gullible health conscious people. An occasional pleasurable dessert, yes, but replacement for your daily glass of milk?