Healthy ice cream

Too often the word “Healthy” is associated with food and, in particular, with ice cream. There are many claims, especially on an industrial level, about products that promise to provide and/or maintain the health of those who consume them, sometimes with deceptive labels that hide some ingredients or do not specify some conditions that such ingredients produce.

A plethora of terms (sugar-free, light, dietary, keto, vegan, etc.) merge and get confused with the concept of healthy food, which, on the other hand, must be a product with very specific, scientifically proven characteristics through studies.
A clear example is the association between Vegan and healthy, with the majority of consumers strongly believing that everything that comes from the plant world is healthy, when it really is not; from the plant world can come types of saturated fat not beneficial to the body, or sugars with medium-high GI that affect metabolism in general.

So, more than ever, it is essential to define what is healthy, admitting that later it may be possible to achieve 100% in an ice cream.
To identify an archetype related to health, we have to go back to ancient Greece, where health was defined with the word “Homeostasis,” which implied a concept of balance between body and mind, the physical and the psychic, a concept later embodied by the Romans with the definition “Mens sana in corpore sano”; a concept that obviously encompasses different conditions, not only related to food.

A concept that, at the food level, fits with the word “Metabolism,” i.e., the set of physiological mechanisms that serve so that the human being can use the energy stored in food, eliminating the parts that are not functional to his survival.
So, how can ice creams be classified as healthy?

Let's say for simplicity that an ice cream can be healthy in two ways, which can also complement each other, and they are:

1. Indirect Way:
An ice cream can be healthy when the set of its ingredients does not imbalance overall metabolism. We will be making a healthy ice cream, for example, when we use sugars with low GI, unsaturated fat, plant proteins, and dietary fibers.

2. Direct Way:
These are those ice creams that, due to their characteristics and the presence of some particular ingredients, fulfill specific functions scientifically proven in terms of optimizing physiological processes, and preventing and/or curing pathological processes.

In the first case, we will limit ourselves to looking for and using a range of ingredients that do not impact the metabolism of the main macronutrients, such as sugars with low GI, unsaturated fats, possibly monounsaturated, high-performance plant proteins, and fibers that replace classic additives and high GI bulking agents, like maltodextrin.

In the second case, we will give those same products specific functionality, through micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), superfoods, and/or nutraceutical products, looking for the most appropriate combinations in terms of textures and flavors, and also generating eccentric and different colors that nature provides us, to attract more public curiosity.

All this will give us the possibility to label our ice creams referring to “Claims” always approved by scientific studies, as marked by the law on functional foods.