Ice Cream is Good For You?

(This is "news about popular science communication", and not medical advice - especially since, as a reader of this blog, you're likely someone who will find glorious confirmation in the results...)

Via a thread on Bluesky I encountered an article from The Atlantic titled Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result (alternate version) pointing to a 2018 Harvard doctoral dissertation1 that suggests a counterintuitive reduction in heart health problems associated with a particular risk group consuming half a cup of ice cream a day. The article focuses more on the "how science is supposed to work" part of it, than actual mechanism - we're far over on the "more research would be interesting" side of the line, not the "change your diet/join our cult" side.2

The thread author writes about a personal experience with health and ice cream that aligned well with the article and has some interesting theories around stress, cortisol, and saturated fats. I think the sensible takeaway is probably just "no really, individual humans really can be more different from an ideal metabolism than we'd like to pretend they are."

And after all, you were going to go have some ice cream anyway, right?

  1. This looks like it's just the abstract, though the PDF might be available if you have academic access to Harvard NRS or DASH? ↩

  2. We may not actually be the dark side, but we do, in fact, have cookies... ↩