{"id":1042,"date":"2023-04-13T19:53:01","date_gmt":"2023-04-13T19:53:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/?p=1042"},"modified":"2023-04-14T02:40:50","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T02:40:50","slug":"ice-cream-may-be-good-for-you-scientists-uncomfortably-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/ice-cream-may-be-good-for-you-scientists-uncomfortably-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Ice Cream May be Good for You, Scientists Uncomfortably Say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Public health historian David Merritt Johns has written <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2023\/05\/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study\/673487\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an unusually thorough and lucid piece in The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0on this unlikely research phenomenon: <strong>a series of scientific studies shows a health benefit to eating ice cream. And the researchers have been trying\u2014and mostly failing\u2014to find flaws in the results.<\/strong><\/p>\n<h4>What\u2019s really going on here?<\/h4>\n<p>Nutrition health research is fiendishly difficult. It\u2019s prone to every imaginable kind of bias, ranging from data reporting biases of the test subjects, experiment design biases, researcher biases, cultural biases, population selection biases, and on and on.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, we\u2019re unable to (for example) grow 100 diabetic humans in a petri dish under identical conditions, inoculate 70 of them with ice cream, 30 of them with a perfect ice cream placebo, and observe the results for 40 years. We\u2019re stuck with imperfect methods, whose strengths and shortfalls Merritt describes briefly but well.<\/p>\n<p>Science, fortunately, offers robust tools to help control for bias. These tools let us go back to the data with hypotheses like, \u201cmaybe the people who don\u2019t eat ice cream are actually less healthy because many of them have pre-existing problem; they don&#8217;t eat ice cream because their doctors told them not to.\u201d This particular bias is called \u201creverse causation.\u201d It\u2019s one of the many that the researchers probed for. And yet: when they controlled for this one and others, the results did not go away.<\/p>\n<h4>What do the studies tell us?<\/h4>\n<p><strong>Moderate ice cream consumption might reduce your chances of developing insulin resistance, type-2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.<\/strong> In these regards, the effects of ice cream appear equal to, or even slightly better than, those of yogurt.<\/p>\n<h4>What\u2019s still Unclear?<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>How certain we should be about these results<\/li>\n<li>If the results are causal and not merely correlative<\/li>\n<li>The mechanism of any positive health benefit<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>Is this fringe science?<\/h4>\n<p>No. Several groups of researchers, driven partly by normal scientific diligence, partly by fear of further muddying the dangerously muddy waters of popular nutrition science, have attempted to find flaws in the studies. They\u2019ve scrutinized, probed for biases, and compared with older and newer studies. The results, while still not a statistical slam-dunk, keep holding up.<\/p>\n<p>Nevertheless, some of the scientists directly involved in the studies are trying to keep the results quiet. They likely want to avoid the risks of overconfidently or prematurely refuting a long-standing orthodoxy. And they probably don\u2019t want their results mischaracterized, to the detriment of public health, by lazy journalists or charlatans. Or, um &#8230; people like me.<\/p>\n<h4>What\u2019s my take?<\/h4>\n<p>That this is interesting. That if your overall diet and lifestyle are healthy, and even if they&#8217;re not, you shouldn\u2019t worry about eating some ice cream a few times a week. Which has always been my take.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not going to go full-on clickbait and declare ice cream a superfood. In fact, if you call anything a superfood, even kale or spirulina, I\u2019m going to stop reading. There is no ingredient (or even meal) that\u2019s going to contribute much to your vitality or imminent demise.* It\u2019s the sum total of your your diet and your habits that matter. Cheese steak and gelato are just small pieces of this picture. Unless for you they\u2019re very large pieces\u2014then you might have a problem. Even then, the genetic cards you\u2019ve been dealt, for better or worse, probably overshadow most of these choices.<\/p>\n<h4>In Closing<\/h4>\n<p>If you\u2019re familiar with my recipes, you\u2019ll notice that I aim for a more intense experience\u2014distinct, vibrant flavors, and a texture balanced to deliver those flavors fast and long. The hope is that you can substitute intensity\u2014and quality\u2014for quantity. If a single quenelle of ice cream can take you on a technicolor, ayahuasca-like journey into the deepest jungles of your mind, you probably don\u2019t need a triple sundae.<\/p>\n<p>So eat ice cream in good health. Make it the good stuff, so you won\u2019t be tempted to eat too much. And as always, further research is warranted.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h4>\nSelected Research Papers\u00a0<\/h4>\n<p>Jean-Philippe Drouin-Chartier, Yanping Li, Andres Victor Ardisson Korat, Ming Ding, Beno\u00eet Lamarche, JoAnn E Manson, Eric B Rimm, Walter C Willett, Frank B Hu, <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/ajcn\/article\/110\/5\/1201\/5554781\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Changes in dairy product consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: results from 3 large prospective cohorts of US men and women<\/a>, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 110, Issue 5, November 2019, Pages 1201\u20131212, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/ajcn\/nqz180<\/p>\n<p>Chen, M., Sun, Q., Giovannucci, E. et al. <a href=\"https:\/\/bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com\/articles\/10.1186\/s12916-014-0215-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dairy consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes: 3 cohorts of US adults and an updated meta-analysis<\/a>. BMC Med 12, 215 (2014). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1186\/s12916-014-0215-1<\/p>\n<p>Pereira MA, Jacobs, Jr DR, Van Horn L, Slattery ML, Kartashov AI, Ludwig DS. <a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama\/article-abstract\/194858\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dairy Consumption, Obesity, and the Insulin Resistance Syndrome in Young Adults: The CARDIA Study<\/a>. JAMA. 2002;287(16):2081\u20132089. doi:10.1001\/jama.287.16.2081<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>*For the sake of argument, I&#8217;m not counting mercury, benzene, botulinum toxin, etc. as &#8220;ingredients.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Public health historian David Merritt Johns has written an unusually thorough and lucid piece in The Atlantic\u00a0on this unlikely research phenomenon: a series of scientific studies shows a health benefit to eating ice cream. And the researchers have been trying\u2014and mostly failing\u2014to find flaws in the results. What\u2019s really going on here? Nutrition health research is fiendishly difficult. It\u2019s prone &#8230; <\/p>\n<div> <span class=\"clearfix\"> <a href=\"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/ice-cream-may-be-good-for-you-scientists-uncomfortably-say\/\" class=\"more-link pull-left\">Read More <span class=\"screen-reader-text sr-only\"> About: Ice Cream May be Good for You, Scientists Uncomfortably Say <\/span><\/a><\/span> <\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":""},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1065,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions\/1065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/under-belly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}