Is ice cream the ivermectin of the food world, something with profound health benefits that the medical establishment refuses to acknowledge? Perhaps not, in that no one is being censored or canceled for touting the frozen delight. Nonetheless, a number of studies show that ice cream has health benefits — and, try as they might, scientists have been unable thus far to debunk these findings.
Apropos to this, when I had a health and heart check-up approximately a year and a half ago, the medical professional handling matters told me that only one percent of people my age have blood-work numbers such as mine. “Whatever you’re doing,” he then remarked, “keep it up.” Without missing a beat, I replied:
“Well, what I’m doing is, I’m eating ice cream first thing in the morning — so I’ll keep it up.”
No, I’m not recommending you mainline chocolate-fudge swirl; the medical professional also mentioned that I likely enjoy a beneficial genetic predisposition. This said, the ice cream-finding is perhaps both fascinating and befuddling.
The Atlantic’s David Merritt Johns reported on it Thursday, writing:
LAST SUMMER, I got a tip about a curious scientific finding. “I’m sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this,” my tipster said.
Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.
A superior then instructed Ardisson Korat to do more digging. Yet as he “spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile,” Johns also writes. “The ice-cream signal was robust.”
Calling this “hilarious,” Johns continued. “‘I do sort of remember the vibe being like, Hahaha, this ice-cream thing won’t go away; that’s pretty funny,’ recalled my tipster, who’d attended the presentation.”
The bottom line is that scientists find the ice-cream thesis so hard to believe that they suppress the data. “The problem with this result wasn’t just that it ran counter to all modern theories about healthy eating; it was also that it replicated something prior researchers had found and resisted, to the point of burying it in footnotes and refusing to speak to the media,” writes commentator Andrea Widburg.
Widburg also relates the results of an associated Harvard study, one from 2002. It “examined more than 5,000 young adults for heart disease risk factors: ‘Pretty much across the board — low-fat, high-fat, milk, cheese — dairy foods appeared to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes,’” she writes. “What was buried in that subject was that ice cream ‘was associated for overweight people with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin-resistance syndrome. It was by far the biggest effect seen in the study, 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk.’”
The same result emerged via a huge longitudinal study that followed men between 1986 and ’98 and was released in 2005. “This time, the authors claimed that the big reduction in the risk of Type II diabetes came from consuming low-fat or nonfat dairy products, not whole milk or cream products,” Widburg states. But there was one exception — ice cream.
In fact, while men who drank two or more skim or low-fat milk servings daily had a 22-percent lower diabetes risk — so did the fellows who ate two or more ice-cream servings weekly. (And who do you think had more fun?!)
The conclusion Widburg draws is that diary is healthful. She points out that Westerners have lived on a high-dairy diet for ages and that, currently, yogurt is touted as not only lowering diabetes risk but also for providing bacteria associated with a healthy gut biome.
Of course, the jury on ice cream is still out. One problem is that these studies rely on people’s self-reporting of their eating habits. Moreover, there’s the “reverse causation” possibility. For example, informs the Atlantic article, “people who already had health problems may have stopped eating ice cream, while people with no health problems continued to eat it,” Widburg further relates. “In that scenario, it wouldn’t be that ice cream prevented diabetes, but that being at risk of developing diabetes caused people not to eat ice cream.” Yet researchers who adjusted for this factor still found that ice cream offered some benefits.
The Atlantic also points out that ice cream boosts blood sugar less rapidly than does brown rice and cites an expert who claims it’s “better for you than bread.”
This may now be starting to sound like the old ’50s cigarette commercials (“Nine out of 10 doctors prefer Camels!”), or you may be wondering if the Atlantic gets funding from Unilever (which owns Breyers ice cream). Or it could remind a film buff of 1973’s Sleeper, in which a future scientist, addressing how people once believed that things such as wheat germ and tiger’s milk were good for you and deep fat, steak, and cream pies bad for you, said, it’s “precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true” (short video below).
In reality, the above relates a truth: Today’s health dogma can be tomorrow’s health demon. Nutrition is still an inexact science, and, as Covid proved, the health establishment can be very wrong and change its story very quickly.
Thus is adherence to the old adage “everything in moderation” always wise. After all, the toxicological principle informs, “The dose makes the poison.” That is to say, everything is either toxic (including water) or tolerable — depending on the level.
Full disclosure: I finally had another medical check-up on Wednesday, and while my blood work was again excellent, my LDL (“bad cholesterol”) was a bit elevated, though still good for a man my age. But the reason is that I deviated from the above principle a bit. My ice cream intake is the same, but I have over the last year been eating notably less fish and more bacon. I’d become complacent after my previous stellar results.
I’ll now resurrect my former dietary habits — and maintain the ice cream intake — so that I can continue raising leftists’ blood pressure with incisive commentary for years to come.
