we're blending cheese now

Blend cottage cheese with honey and frozen fruit, freeze it, and the internet says you've made ice cream with 20 grams of protein. There's also cottage cheese cheesecake, cottage cheese cookie dough, cottage cheese brownie batter. The whole category exists now.

The protein claim mostly checks out, which is more than I can say for most trends. A cup of cottage cheese has around 24 grams, comparable to a chicken breast, and unlike a lot of protein swaps you're not paying for it with a strange ingredient list. Cottage cheese is milk, cream, salt, and cultures.

So it earns the hype more than most of what shows up on this blog.

But it's a snack, not a dessert. That's the part that gets lost. Blended cottage cheese with honey and berries is around 300 calories and eats like a small meal, because 24 grams of protein is genuinely filling. Real ice cream is around 270 for two thirds of a cup and is not filling at all, which is the entire point of ice cream.

These are different foods doing different jobs. One of them is a decent post workout snack that happens to be sweet. The other is a treat. Treating the first as a replacement for the second only works if what you wanted was protein, and usually what you wanted was ice cream.

The sugar doesn't disappear. Most of these recipes need real sweetening to work, because plain cottage cheese blended up tastes like plain cottage cheese blended up. Honey, maple syrup, and chocolate chips are all sugar. The protein number goes on the caption. The sweetener doesn't.

Sodium is the one nobody mentions. A cup of cottage cheese can hit 700 milligrams, which is a real chunk of a day's worth. Not a problem occasionally. Worth knowing if you're eating it daily, which is what the trend encourages.

Cottage cheese is a good food and the trend is one of the more reasonable ones out there. Eat it.

Just call it what it is. It's a high protein snack with fruit in it, and it's good at that. Calling it ice cream sets up a comparison it's going to lose, and then people decide healthy food is disappointing when the actual problem was the label on the recipe.

If you want ice cream, have ice cream. If you want 24 grams of protein at 9 pm, this is a much better option than most things.