The Random Blogger

We tend to get through quite a bit of ice cream, even though there’s just the two of us (not forgetting our seven dogs, of course), and as we never drive anywhere, it all has to be delivered.

Now, the good news is that we have a frozen food home delivery service that calls round every fortnight; the bad news is that there are very few flavours that my wife is able to eat.

So, after doing a lot of research, we decided to splash out and buy our own soft serve ice cream maker - a Whynter SNO Ice Cream Maker to be precise - so that we could make whatever flavours work best for us.

Originally, we were going to go for the Lello 4090 Gelato Pro, but after reading some of the reviews on Amazon.com, we decided not to bother. To be fair, there are plenty of people who have found it to be a great machine, but there are also enough saying that they have had significant problems.

The machine arrived a couple of days ago, although owing to various diversions, we’ve not even unpacked the box yet.

However, we are looking forward to trying it out (having also bought several recipe books and other accessories / ingredients), and I’ll report back once we’ve tasted the results.

There are many ways that you can have a healthy diet.

For example, you could eat less food, although calorie-counting is not necessarily the best way for long-term weight loss and may not make your diet any healthier.

Or you could try food-combining, which can make sure your body receives the right balance of nutrients.

Or, you could eat “the right food”, whatever that may mean today (as the medical profession change their minds about what is healthy or not on an all-too-frequent basis).

And part of deciding what is “right” or not is based on the ingredients.

Which is why manufacturers nowadays are obliged to print details on the label - so you can see exactly what is in the product.

But there is, of course, a problem with this - the number of unhealthy ingredients that are in some of these foods.

As an example, let’s take a product called Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, which is basically macaroni and beef in a tomato sauce.

The version we’re interested in here comes in a 14.5 oz (or 411.068085 grams for you metric people) microwavable tub.

The first two things we look at on any food label are the amounts of trans fats and sodium in the product.

Now, the good news with Beefaroni is that there are no trans fats.

However, the amount of sodium is somewhat scary - 920mg, which represents 38% of your RDA (i.e. Recommended Daily Allowance):

Just by itself, nearly a whole gram of salt in such a small tub of food is too much …

… but then you realise that this 14.5oz tub is meant to contain nearly two servings, not just one - they claim the serving size is 249 grams (or 8.78 ounces).

I don’t know about you, but half a tub of Beefaroni is not going to cut it - even as a snack. Even a full tub needs topping up with something to transform it into something worth eating.

And in case you can’t see what the wording says on the left of the label, let me spell it out for you - it says “Big Size Bowl - For Big Appetites“.

Yes, it’s true - for those people who don’t have a “big appetite”, they also make this product in a 7.5oz (or 212 grams) tub, although I’m not sure who the target audience is for this size of Beefaroni, as even our Chihuahua could polish that off without any trouble.

Anyway, back to the label.

So, once you realise that in spite of what they say the serving size is, you actually need to eat the entire tub to even begin to feel like you’ve eaten anything at all, you find that you’re actually eating almost 1.5 grams of salt, and that means you’ll be consuming nearly two thirds of your daily sodium requirements - in a single small tub.

And that’s why they quote their nutritional facts using absurdly small serving sizes - because if they showed the size of portion that most real people eat, some of those nutritional figures (especially the sodium content) would be so high that nobody in their right mind would buy them.

I have to confess to being a chocoholic.

There, I said it - in public!

Actually, this will come as no surprise to those who know me well.

I even used to belong to a luxury chocolate tasting club, but moving to the US meant I had to cancel that - I’m not sure those chocolates would have survived being mailed internationally.

So, although it’s possible to order chocolate online over here in the US, the extreme heat in summer means that most companies won’t ship it - not even an overnight service with ice packs is enough, and high quality chocolate is far too good to let it melt and go to waste.

Well, you can probably imagine that I was more than excited to learn about (more…)