Healthy Food Choices: Ice Cream

Ice cream has been a luxury dessert food for almost 200 years, the origins extending ever further into the past. Try these tips for buying ice cream in this healthy shopping video.

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Sherbet and sorbets have lower milk fat
Frozen yogurt as fattening as ice cream
Choose ice milk over ice cream

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Michelle Cooper has been a registered dietician for more than 10 years. She currently works for the state of North Carolina for the New Hanover County School District in the Child Nutrition Department as the supervising registered dietician on staff. She specializes in child nutrition, child fitness and overall child health. She enjoys her job because it allows her to be a pivotal piece of child development.

MICHELLE COOPER: Next, we're going to talk about ice cream and some healthy options. Ice cream, ice milk, sherbet and sorbet, it can be confusing. One easy way to remember is ice cream contains all the milk fat and the cream that belongs with it, so it is the highest in fat. Ice milk is its low fat counterpart; it's made with skim milk. Even lower in fat would be sherbet and even lower in fat than that would be sorbet which are like frozen fruit juices. Another low-fat option would be a fudge bar, a popsicle, a fruit bar or other frozen sorbets. A frozen yogurt can be low in fat but you need to look for non fat or fat free or lite because the whole fat yogurt can be just as high as the ice cream. If you're a diabetic, you might want to consider getting the low sugar or sugar free popsicle, sorbet or ice cream. So remember, you can have ice cream as part of a healthy diet but try to choose ice milk over ice cream, low-fat or non-fat yogurt, sherbet or sorbet, and if you need to watch your sugar intake opt for the sugar free as well.

Healthy Food Choices: Ice Cream Video

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