So here’s the scoop (sorry, not sorry): Ice cream is just another a food and food marketers are just marketers. That’s the TLDR portion, or vanilla version, if you will. For better flavors and the topping bar, read on.

This post is about ice cream and taking back the product from marketing ploys and fad diets. Ice cream practically screams “unhealthy” in our society, but I beg to differ. Demonizing ice cream is unhealthy. Ice cream is just food, like a banana or potato chips. And we demonize potato chips too. We can joke about being a couch potato, especially in COVID times, but no one actually wants to be seen as a true couch potato because we see that as being unhealthy. What’s unhealthy is putting so much stigma around food and labeling food as good or bad, which takes me back to my point.

Ice cream is a food. Just a food.

With fad diets being what they are (popular but dumb), they have made food choices more complicated than ever. Regular old crackers now sit next to low-fat, gluten-free, no-salt-added, sugar-free, low-carb (i.e., pointless) crackers on the grocery store shelves. And with all the hype around fad diets, going for the regular crackers (poor things) when there’s a “healthier” alternative makes you second guess if you’re making the right choice. *Sigh* As if nutrition weren’t complex enough to follow, we’ve added so much undo complexity that anything you eat could arguably be unhealthy. Like, “Oh, you ate the whole banana? But think of the carbs!” Or, “Only eat 16 almonds otherwise it’s too calorific.” Lord help us.

Now take ice cream, which is already labeled as a “bad” food, demonized for its carbs and fat. Ice cream is the low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Of course companies capitalize on society’s unhealthy relationship with ice cream and say, “Hey, we can make something that we call ice cream but without all the things that make it ice cream and then promote it as the ‘healthy’ choice. People will love it!”

GKHSFGJKDFHGJKGN.

Now, I will confess that I eat non-dairy ice cream because I follow a plant-based diet (for the record, I mean “diet” in the literal terms, defined by Merriam-Webster as “food and drink regularly provided or consumed”). So, you can tell me that I’m eating ice cream without the things that make it ice cream (i.e., cream) and I’d accept that. The point I’m trying to make is that the food marketing industry, blindly appeasing fad diets, have turned ice cream into something to be feared — oh no! there’s actually a carb in there? — and therefore gave power to the marketers to tell us whether we should eat that ice cream (i.e., only if it’s low-fat, low-carb, low-calorie, what have you).

Let me get real specific here because I’m not here to play. Well, kinda, because I’m having a lot of fun with this. But, putting on my public-health-do-gooder hat, I’ll name names. Halo Top, for one. I hate the stuff. I mean, it doesn’t taste bad. Scratch that, the one non-dairy one I had tastes pretty bad if you ask me. What grates me about Halo Top is that they not only promote the calorie content as part of their branding, which is bad enough as is, but also encourage you to eat the whole pint because it’s that low-calorie. Eating the whole pint isn’t the bad part. The bad part is that they’re basically telling you it’s okay to eat the whole pint because they’ve made it into a product that would be okay to “indulge” in. Please, spare me. I get to decide what is indulgent or not, and honestly, it depends on the day. Because though I eat ice cream in the dead of winter while standing outside, clutching the cone with nearly frostbitten hands, there are times, believe it or not, when I’m non-plussed about it (those times are rare, FYI). The point is that I want to be in control of deciding to eat ice cream, not playing the good food vs. bad food game the food marketing companies are shouting from the grocery store shelves. Halo Top isn’t the only one. Breyers Carb Smart, Keto Pint, Enlightened. All making regular ice cream look bad because of it’s natural state. I’m all for eating whole foods, but promoting carb-less or fat-less products that are naturally full of carbs and fat makes me wonder if we’ll start selling celery disguised in ice cream pints. Wait…celery is mostly carbs, so scratch that idea. The shelves are being stocked with foods from companies that are capitalizing on fad diets, trying to one up each other. I just think it’s kinda ridiculous. I mean, look at the trend of searching “keto ice cream” over the past five years:

And guess what the top related search was? Halo Top Creamery. The second and third were “Enlightened” and “Enlightened ice cream light.” Wait a second…enlightened light? Jiminy Christmas. What a game. Such is marketing.

I want to change the way we market foods, but I don’t bother thinking I can take down the whole food marketing industry with my petty (from their perspective) posts. But, as a health communicator, I can use my knowledge of nutrition and public health to create health messages that debunk good food/bad food myths. I will also lean on my personal experience having had an unhealthy relationship with food.

Let me start by saying this: I get it. We’re all just trying our best here, and nutrition can be confusing. I’m not a registered dietician, nor a health coach. I studied nutrition in college and in my MPH program, and it continues to be one of my favorite health topics to research, especially as it relates to food marketing. What the food marketing has done to our relationship with food has affected all of us. For me, it manifested as disordered eating in college: preoccupation with calorie counting and my weight (especially after gaining the Freshman 15…at least), spending a lot of time agonizing over what I should eat (even picking up foods then putting them back…multiple times), ignoring hunger pangs, and running off (literally) guilt of overeating. It was unhealthy and exhausting.

In my senior year of college, I started to have a better relationship with food after learning about disordered eating in a nutrition class. I knew my eating behaviors didn’t classify as an eating disorder (i.e., anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or binge-eating disorder). But I knew my behaviors and thoughts about food were putting me in dangerous territory. Once I realized “Oh, this is disordered eating,” my attitude toward my behavior changed. Acknowledging it with a name moved the needle just enough to a point where I felt I had more power to do something about it. To label is to disable as they say.

It took me a few years to have a better relationship with food. It was definitely a process. I shared more with my friends and family, conceding that I was preoccupied with my weight at times. When I felt shamed by friends for being thin even if I ate pasta and other carb-heavy foods, I spoke up about how that can be damaging. When I heard people talk about carbs as if they were demons, I offered the fact that fruits and vegetables are full of carbs…what then? Suffice it to say that I encouraged myself to have a healthier relationship with food, and it’s an ongoing thing. It’s a work in progress always, which is why I feel so passionate about debunking some good food vs. bad food myths. Ice cream is just one example.

In my opinion, ice cream is just another food — not all good and not all bad. The extremism around labeling and demonizing the food is the bad part. The good part is we don’t have to. Food marketing companies are just marketing companies. They label their products as healthy so that we eat it. “Healthy” is obviously a subjective term. Yet we continue to play by the marketer’s labeling rules. For example, supporting the “healthy” ice cream market without really questioning what makes it “healthy.”

Being healthy is so intertwined with marketing that of course the food marketers capitalize on that: if they just label (literally) a “bad” food as “good” (i.e., healthy ice cream), then it’s all good in the hood. They’ve taken advantage of the stigma associated with “unhealthy” foods, making us lose sight of what’s really important: the things that make a food a food. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty here about how to define food. I’ll stay high-level because as much as I love science, the science of food is a rabbit hole that I’d rather not go down.

Which brings me back to the point of all this: Marketing companies are changing our relationship with food, oftentimes for the worse, if you ask me. Halo Top and its competitors are so focused on engineering their products to be ice cream without the guilt that it often ends up being who-knows-what. Reducing the identity of an ice cream to its calorie or carb/fat content is just plain unfair to poor ice cream (really, what did it ever do to anyone?). A food is more than its calories. Let me repeat that: a food is more than its calories. It has both macronutrients and micronutrients, and becoming too preoccupied with any of them, unless there is a medical need to, is walking a thin line. Sure, calorie content can be a useful bit of information for, say, staying alive, but unnecessarily obsessing over it is not useful—or helpful, for that matter.

We’re all just trying our best here, and we are heavily influenced by marketers who are generally clueless about nutrition and don’t really give a darn about how their marketing affects your health (mental and physical) so long as you pick their product from the shelf. Ice cream is of course just one example. As are the crackers I mentioned earlier. I picked ice cream because I love it, and I hate food marketers for making me lose my healthy relationship with it (and all socially demonized foods) all those years ago. So, please excuse me while I defend ice cream with a fiery spoon.

Fad diets are just fads. Food marketers are just marketers. Food is just food. And that’s my scoop.