For improved health, eat ice cream

Extensive research has shown that, among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. As reported in the May, 2023 issue of The Atlantic magazine, numerous studies, beginning 20 years ago, kept coming up with similar benefits of eating ice cream. Of course, the researchers didn’t like the finding. Data was double-checked. No errors could be found. Nutritionists tried to make it go away, but their debunking efforts have been largely futile.

Medical data collected by Harvard since the 1980s found that men who consumed two or more servings of skim or low-fat milk a day had a 22 percent lower risk of diabetes. But so did men who ate two or more servings of ice cream every week. Of course, no one wanted to talk about this finding.

Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, had stumbled on a similar association more than 20 years earlier. He found that, for overweight people, “dairy-based dessert” (ice cream) was associated with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes. Oddly, the effect of ice cream was 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk. “We analyzed the heck out of the data.…This study surprised the heck out of me.”

Ice cream’s glycemic index, which measures how rapidly a food raises blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. One scientist mentioned that ice cream is better for you than bread. “It’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins.” One man ate 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements, plus liquor (Irish whiskey milkshakes). After 100 days, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started this regimen.

Of course, I love this sort of thing. As The Atlantic article mentioned, “Once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts.”

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