Lemon curd is best thought of as both a dessert topping and spread that is most commonly made with the fundamental ingredients of zest, fruit juice, sugar and beaten egg yolks. The ingredients are cooked together until such a point where the mixture is thick. At that point, it will be let alone to cool until it finally forms a spread or topping that has an intense flavor and is both smooth and soft.
Alternative recipes of lemon curd allow you to use butter, margarine and egg whites also. Lemon curd is an intensely unhealthy type of topping and spread that should only be eaten rarely, if that. It is heavy in both fat as well as carbohydrates.
Calories in Lemon Curd
The calorie content in lemon curd is very high, and this should weigh on your mind significantly before you think of consuming significant quantities of it. To put into perspective how high the number of calories for lemon curd are, a serving of only 0.03 milliliters of lemon curd will already net you 200 calories. To put this into an alternative form of perspective, to work off this amount of calories that have entered your body, you will have to engage in 38 minutes of strenuous bicycle riding, 50 minutes of well-paced walking, 30 minutes of swimming, 22 minutes of cross-country skiing or 18 minutes of running. Looking at this in still another way, if you eat only one teaspoon of lemon curd--which equals 7 grams--you are already ingesting 23 calories right there.
Carb, Fat, Protein Distribution
In any amount of lemon curd, the proportion of unhealthy elements like carbs and fat is going to be extremely higher than good elements like protein. In any serving size of lemon curd, you will only receive a benefit of 2.2 percent of protein while getting almost 27 percent fat and nearly 71 percent carbs. Carbs are harmful to your body because they are one of the primary reasons that you gain weight. Foods with high contents of carbs, like lemon curd, will cause you to gain weight more quickly. While it can be argued that fat is healthy for the body on some occasions because it acts like fuel that you need, fat also contributes to diseases like heart disease and cancer, not to mention being bad for your liver.
Absence of Essential Vitamins and Minerals
Furthering the reality that lemon curd is an unhealthy type of food that mainly works toward you gaining weight is the fact that lemon curd contains no vitamins at all. Vitamins are organic compounds that are essential for nutritional purposes. Lemon curd also has absolutely no essential minerals that your body needs to function properly, like iron or calcium. Calcium is essential to the human body, as it helps to keep bones both strong and dense, while iron is essential because it helps carry oxygen to your tissues.
