Marshall Brain's Blog

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The Perfect Food

Breyers makes a calcium-enriched ice cream -- a half cup of it has 30% of the calcium you need every day.



The question I have is this -- could you also make this ice cream protein-enriched and vitamin-enriched to create the perfect food??? You would eat nothing but ice cream all day, and you would get everything you need from it. My kids, in particlar, would find the Enriched Ice Cream Diet extremely appealing!

When you think about it, this is not such a crazy idea. Babies regularly live for up to a year on nothing but breast milk, and in a pinch they can survive on breast milk until they are three or four. The base material for ice cream is milk, so ice cream is already off to a good start. The biggest thing that ice cream is missing is the protein.

A person needs something like 1 gram of protein per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight per day. A person also needs about 25 calories per kilogram. This means you would like to see 5 or 6 grams of protien in half a cup of ice cream, rather than the traditional 2 or 3 grams. An easy way to add the protien would be eggs -- one large egg per cup of ice cream would add 3 grams or protein per half cup of ice cream. There are all sorts of protein powders that could be added instead, but eggs have the advantage that they don't change the taste, and "eggs in ice cream" is already common. Frozen custard has lots of eggs in it.

Add in the vitamins and minerals, take out a little of the fat, swap the "real vanilla bean flecks" with something having a little more fiber (like wheat bran), and presto -- Enriched Ice Cream is THE PERFECT FOOD!