Soft serve contains the expected dairy and sweeteners, like milk , nonfat milk, sugar, corn syrup and whey, but, there’s more. There’s a listing of harder-to-pronounce ingredients that are even trickier to understand.

We took a look at the ingredients found in McDonald’s and Dairy Queen soft serve, and here’s what we procure is lurking on the listing 😛 TAGEND

Polysorbate 80 is used as an emulsifier in foods and cosmetics. It’s added to soft serve to prevent milk proteins from totally coating the fat droplets. This allows the soft serve to bind and locks air into the concoction.( McDonald’s, DQ)

Mono- and diglycerides come from fatty acids. They’re used as another emulsifier. They help combine ingredients containing fat with ingredients containing water( because the two don’t commonly merge well on their own ).( McDonald’s, DQ)

Carrageenan is a carbohydrate extracted from red seaweed. It’s used for its gelling, stabilizing and thickening properties.( McDonald’s, DQ)

Guar gum is made from the endosperm of the guar bean. It’s used as a thickening agent. The utilize of it in diet pills was banned in the 1980 s because it was dangerous, but small amounts of it like what’s found in soft serve have been established as safe.( McDonald’s, DQ)

Cellulose gum comes from the cell walls of plants such as wood pulp and cottonseeds. It is another thickener. It is commonly used in the food industry and adds to the mouthfeel and texture of a product.( McDonald’s)

Sodium Phosphate is used in many foods and serves many purposes. It can be used as a texturizer, an emulsifier or a leavening agent.( McDonald’s)

Of course , not all soft serve is created equal. You could probably find soft serve without all those additives, but you’ll want to be careful with the cone, dip and toppings. The listed ingredients above find themselves in a lot of those foods.

If you’d like to avoid those added ingredients in your diet, you might consider making your own 2-ingredient “soft serve.” It’s made almost entirely out of bananas, which we can all pronounce.