That’s why you should never eat the tip of an ice-cream cone

Discover what a chemist at the University of Utrecht says about the chocolate in the tip of the packaged cones!

Yes to cones, but not every part. In fact, my dear, you should avoid the part at the tip, down there, where lies the last delightful bit of chocolate. That area of ​​the ice cream cone that we have in the freezer, in short, should not be eaten, since it is full of damaging bad fats.

It’s Bert Weckhuysen who says it, a chemist at the University of Utrecht who claims that the chocolate in the tip of the packaged cones is full of fat and not of a good kind.

In fact, there are more saturated fats, those we find in butter and lard, in biscuits and industrial cakes, in fatty and processed meat, in cheese and cream. The problem, according to this research, lies in the melting point of chocolate.

As Professor Weckhuysen explains (video below), there are two types of fatty acids: saturated and unsaturated fatty acids. At the molecular level, the former would be completely straight chains. In addition, they are solid at room temperature, like butter, and, when consumed in large quantities, they are bad for your health. In particular, they would increase the level of bad cholesterol in the blood.

On the other hand, unsaturated fatty acids, made up of chains that form "elbows", have a fairly low melting point and are liquids at room temperature, such as olive oil. Unsaturated fats can be converted into solid fats through hydrogenation and their double bonds are then transformed into individual bonds. But this technique, however, turns unsaturated fatty acids into saturated fatty acids and it is often used in the production of chocolate to change its melting point.

And this is precisely the point: the producers, as is obvious, do not want the chocolate at the tip to melt quickly or remain completely solid and for this reason they add a good amount of saturated fat. And that’s it. So at the tip there is a bad fats concentrate!

That said, the fact remains that we are talking about packaged ice-cream and, as such, already rich in itself, in general, of sugars, preservatives and, perhaps, of palm oil. Like all industrial snacks, in short, even ice cream cones should be consumed in moderation or avoided altogether, learning, why not, to make at home a nice healthy ice-cream! Here all our recipes.