Wait, is ice cream actually healthy? Scientists are confused

Ice cream lovers, rejoice! Recent research by Harvard's prestigious nutrition department suggests that, as opposed to what you would probably guess, diabetics who eat half a cup of ice cream per day have a LOWER risk of heart problems.

An article in The Atlantic magazine brought this intriguing scientific finding into the spotlight. The journalist discovered new not only the Harvard study, but other large observational studies that go as far back as 1985 linking ice cream to a decreased likelihood of overweight people developing insulin-resistance syndrome.

The Atlantic peice also revealed the scientists' reluctance to discuss this finding. Their skeptism has caused them to thoroughly test the findings... but the "robust ice cream signal" won't go away. "To this day, I still don't have an answer for it," Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, who involved in the research, told the magazine.

However, the 2014 study linking ice cream with health benefits wasn't thrown out due to its strangeness. Instead, it was used to strongly promote a different result: that a "higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk" of type 2 diabetes. Even though the yogurt signal was weaker than ice cream's, the press release featured the headline: "Does a yogurt a day keep diabetes away?"

Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist involved in the ice cream research, told The Atlantic that the findings about ice cream don't align with "closed-minded elite nutrition". This is partly why ice cream findings have been buried in research papers, while other findings, like that about yogurt, are highlighted.

"They don’t want to see it. They might ponder it for a second, chuckle, and not believe it," he says. "I think that’s related to how much the field of nutritional epidemiology in the modern era is steeped in dogma," continues Pereira.

While experts in the article acknowledge it's fair to ask why ice cream wasn't promoted as much as yogurt, they note that basic science provides more reasons to believe that yogurt is healthy.. and that ice cream is not.

In 2017, YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow aimed to demonstrate that only calories matter for weight loss, not the type of food consumed. So, he embarked on a diet of 2,000 calories a day of ice cream, 500 calories a day of protein supplements, and some recreational alcohol for 100 days, hypothesizing it would lead to weight loss.

Image: Abs & Ice Cream, Youtube

Howard-Crow reported feeling awful, but he lost 32 pounds (14.5 kg) and saw blood lipids improve, with higher HDL cholesterol, lower LDL, and significantly lower triglycerides, according to Men's Health. Despite the high sugar content, his blood glucose even slightly decreased. However, he said the experiment was miserable and made him "moody, and just generally unenjoyable to be around."

Image: Abs & Ice Cream, Youtube

Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and author of one of the studies, is skeptical of any ice cream health benefits. However, he told The Atlantic that if similar results were discovered with a patented drug, "you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes."

Don’t run out to buy a tub of cookies and cream just yet. Ice cream is typically loaded with sugar and saturated fat, which have been shown to have negative impacts. Most ice cream also falls into the category of “ultra-processed food,” which has been linked to a huge array of health problems.

Photo: Courtney Cook / Unsplash

But despite its sugar content, ice cream has quite a low glycemic index, which measures how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar. According to Harvard, it’s even lower than that of brown rice. “It’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” nutritionist Mozaffarian told the Atlantic.

Why ice cream appears to be protective for health remains an open question, researchers say. Despite existing evidence, most still believe that ice cream is the opposite of a health food, although not the worst thing you can eat.

While the statistics stand up to scrutiny, scientists suggest there may be various explanations for the ice cream effect. Maybe people eat ice cream instead of less healthy desserts, treat themselves after talking walks or perhaps study participants are not reporting accurately. But these possibilities also confound other observational studies that scientists rely on to draw big conclusions.

Atlantic author David Merritt Johns uses the entire ice cream saga to illustrate how scientific findings, particularly in the field of nutrition, are subject to biases. "If there’s a lesson from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients," he concludes.

Dr. Duane Mellor of the Aston Medical School told The Guardian that we shouldn’t hone into the health benefits of any single food, ice cream included, since whole dietary patterns are what count. "Overall we should not be considering ice-cream as a health food, only something which can be enjoyed in small amounts as part of an overall health dietary pattern,” he said.