Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result. By David Merritt Johns. Back from a short holiday, feeling a bit flippant, so this seemed appealing 🙂
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. …
The ice-cream signal was robust. It was robust, and kind of hilarious. “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. …
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. …
According to the numbers, tucking into a “dairy-based dessert” — a category that included foods such as pudding but consisted, according to [Mark Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota], mainly of 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. “It was pretty astounding,” Pereira told me. “We thought a lot about it, because we thought, Could this actually be the case? ” …
“The risk reduction was almost exclusively associated with low-fat or non-fat dairy foods,” a Harvard news bulletin explained. An article on Fox News’s website underscored the low-fat message: “There was no decrease in men who drank whole milk,” the story said. …
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. Once again, the data suggested that ice cream might be the strongest diabetes prophylactic in the dairy aisle. Yet no one seemed to want to talk about it. …
[A team of researchers based in the Netherlands and at Harvard] also found the ice-cream effect: Consuming as little as a half a cup per week was associated with a 19 percent reduced diabetes risk. But that finding’s epitaph was already written. The researchers concluded that consuming “dairy foods, particularly yogurt,” might help curb the diabetes epidemic …
It could be true:
Could the idea that ice cream is metabolically protective be true? It would be pretty bonkers. Still, there are at least a few points in its favor.
For one, ice cream’s glycemic index, a measure of how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. “There’s this perception that ice cream is unhealthy, but it’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” [Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school] said. “Given how horrible the American diet is, it’s very possible that if somebody eats ice cream and eats less starch … it could actually protect against diabetes.”
The “Got Milk?” crowd also loves to talk about the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” a triple-layered biological envelope that encases the fat in mammalian milk. Some evidence suggests that dairy products in which the membrane is intact, such as ice cream, are more metabolically neutral than foods like butter, where it’s lost during the churn. (That said, regular cream has an intact membrane, and it hasn’t been consistently associated with a reduced diabetes risk.) …
Don’t try this at home (and don’t use bacon):
In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes. Still, the method is unlikely to take the slimming world by storm: Howard-Crow called his ice-cream bender “the most miserable dieting adventure I have ever embarked upon.”
What would drug companies do?
But overall, I found more receptiveness to the ice-cream signal than I was expecting. “It’s been more or less replicated,” Pereira noted. “Whether it’s causal or not still remains an open question.” Mozaffarian agreed: “I think probably the ice cream is still reverse causation,” he said. “But I’m not sure, and I’m kind of annoyed by that.” If this had been a patented drug, he continued, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”
To be clear, none of the experts interviewed for this article is inclined to believe that the ice-cream effect is real,
