Some people love chocolate, some people love peanut butter, but everyone loves to put them together, including in ice cream. This classic combination creates quite the treat for your taste buds, but there's a dark side, and no, not dark chocolate. Hiding under the deliciousness are gratuitous calories, fat and carbohydrates.
Caloric Distribution
According to Benjerry.com, each half cup serving of Peanut Butter Cup weighs in at 360 calories. To make matters worse, 64 percent, or 230 calories, are fat calories. This leaves the other 130 divided between carbohydrates and protein. Before you faint at the thought of eating that much fat, realize that fat is calorie-dense because there are nine calories in a gram. That means they contain slightly more than twice the usable energy of a gram of carbohydrate or protein, which both sit at four calories.
Fat
In every quarter-pint of Peanut Butter Cup you'll find 26 grams of fat, 14 of which are the saturated variety. While you may think that this ice cream sounds like a certified artery clogger, the other 12 grams are either mono or polyunsaturated fats. According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, unsaturated fats help to lower circulating levels of cholesterol, which can decrease the risk for heart disease. However, all fats contain nine calories per gram, so you do need to watch consumption.
Carbohydrates
Every rich, creamy serving of Peanut Butter Cup also has 27 grams of carbohydrates. Of these, 24 grams are sugar. Now, because ice cream is a dairy product, some of these sugars are going to be the naturally occurring lactose. The rest are sucrose, or table sugar. There also is an entire gram of dietary fiber, most likely from the ground peanuts. So, that accounts for 25 grams of total carbs; where are the other two? They're probably in the natural starch that's in some of the other ingredients.
Protein
According to Benjerry.com, each serving contains 6 grams of protein. That's a little more than most of the other flavors, so where does it come from? Most will be in the form of casein protein. This is the kind of protein that occurs naturally in milk products. The other portion will come from the peanut content.
Ingredients
This pint is made up of cream, skim milk, liquid sugar, which is a sugar-water mix, water, peanuts, sugar, coconut oil, egg yolks, peanut oil, partially defatted peanut flour, milk, cocoa, salt, soy lecithin, guar gum, natural flavor and carrageenan, says Benjerry.com. For an ice cream that's supposed to be all natural, carrageenan, guar gum and soy lechtin are some sketchy-sounding ingredients. But carrageenan is an extract from red seaweed that's used as a vegetarian substitute for gelatin. Guar gum is the product of grinding up the guar bean, and it's used as a natural emulsifier. Soy lecithin is another all-natral emulsifier derived from soy beans.
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