If you've wandered the freezer aisle of your supermarket at all this year, there's a good chance you've noticed a few pints you've never heard of before. These brands don't advertise their names — or even their flavors — as boldly as they do their calorie counts, but they've developed quite the fan following, ushering in a trend of low-calorie, high-protein ice cream.
Now, Breyers is entering the market with its new Delights line. Like Halo Top, Enlightened, and Arctic Zero, it sells its ice cream by the pint, noting its calorie count front and center. Its vanilla bean flavor, for example, features the number 260 big and bold on the center of the pint — as in 260 calories for the entire pint.
That's the big appeal of these low-cal ice creams; they pack as many calories into a pint of ice cream as some other brands cram into a single, 1/2-cup serving. That, and the fact that they're often packed with more protein than the typical sweet. Breyers' new line features 20 grams in every pint. Similarly, Halo Top averages about 20 to 24 grams per pint, and Enlightened has about 24-28.
Breyers' new line comes in four flavors: vanilla bean, chocolate, mint chip, and cookies & cream. They'll hit stores nationwide this August, though some pints have already been spotted at Stop & Shop.
As Junk Banter's Instagram post shows, this ice cream's sweetened with erythritol, a natural sugar alcohol that has 1/20th of the calories of regular sugar. (Enlightened and Halo Top also use it.) It's found naturally in fruits like watermelon and grapes, but it can be made by fermenting starches with yeast. Consuming too much of it, though — say, through a low-calorie-ice-cream-only diet, as some people have tried — could lead to diarrhea and headaches, the New York Post warns.
It falls in line with that old adage: Everything in moderation. Even (low-calorie) ice cream.
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