With one of the hottest summers on record going strong, ice cream sellers are sure to see a hike in sales once numbers are tallied at the end of the year. While a simple vanilla cone won’t have much adverse affect on the typical waistline, The Daily Beast crunched nutritional data from 14 national franchises known for their ice cream sundaes, scoops, waffle cones, and outrageous toppings to find out which are most likely ruin that beach figure.
Ice cream, or variants thereof, are speculated to have been around since Nero, but modern ice cream came into vogue around the turn of the 20th century with the advent of the ice cream cone and the banana split. Today, the ice cream industry is a multibillion-dollar business, and ice cream concoctions have evolved well beyond the split.
To find out the sweetest, most oozingest, nuttiest, caramel-covered, highest-calorie ice cream meals—yes, these can safely be classified as meals—we narrowed down the top 40 from 127 ice cream creations with 800 or more calories. We ran the nutritional value numbers across five nutritional categories: calories, cholesterol, saturated fat, sodium, and carbohydrates. Each ice cream was ranked within each nutritional category, then the ranking each ice cream received for each nutritional category was totaled to determine the final ranking.
Click Below for Our Ranking of the Unhealthiest Ice Cream at National Chain Restaurants
• 41 Deadliest Fast-Food Meals • 40 Desserts That Can Kill You A big ol’ cup of soft-serve ice cream blended with candy is invariably the overall worst for health. Any sort of caramel or fudge topping adds to ice cream’s gut-busting qualities. Nuts and cake too—the more complicated ice cream becomes with add-ons, the worse it is for you. On the flip side, there’s always the Thornton Wilder approach: “My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy the ice cream while it’s on your plate.”