In April, a story came to the fore that for many years scientists have kept a surprising discovery under wraps. The finding is that ice-cream can be good for health. The Atlantic magazine released a report titled The Ice Cream Conspiracy by public health historian David Merritt Jones.
This story begins in 2018. Research by a doctoral student at Harvard Medical School led him to conclude that eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems in diabetics. The discovery was very interesting, so the senior scientists asked him to investigate again. Yet the benefits of ice-cream have survived all the harshest onslaughts.
This isn’t the first time a scientific study at Harvard has linked ice-cream to health benefits; 20 years ago, researcher Mark A. Pereira looked at data from more than 5,000 adults to determine the effects of diet on the heart. Talking about low-fat dairy products, there was a good effect on health, then low-fat products mainly included ice cream, which showed a beneficial effect. Ice-cream was found to reduce the risk of being pre-diabetic.
Following a Report Published in The Atlantic, ‘Can Ice-Cream be Healthy?’
Headline reports flooded in. In journalism, if you see exclamation marks in a headline, it implies that the author is not known. Later published reports fueled an unspoken expectation that ice-cream was not only a healthy food, but also beneficial to health, if consumed daily in moderation. However, then the scientific community was not ready to accept it as truth.
In fact, the main message of The Atlantic’s report was not that ice cream could be beneficial, but that ice cream was unpopular with nutrition scientists. If there was any other food item that did not contain sugar, it would be popularly accepted, but ice cream was not accepted. Nutrition scientists and media also suppressed this fact under a sense of responsibility.
Jones noted a 2014 study that found high consumption of yogurt linked to type 2 diabetes risk, while other dairy products did not. Curd is considered a superhero in the food industry and one questions the good things that happen to it. It was not true that the study did not find any other dairy products associated with diabetes risk.
The test found that the feel-good effect of ice cream was more favorable than that of yogurt. Still, most scientists haven’t figured out how they can disprove the benefits of ice cream. What is the truth after all? Jones points out, even ice cream is more beneficial than brown rice. It also contains vitamins and proteins. It is not factually wrong, but what if people are encouraged to make ice cream a staple food? Not only did a YouTuber lose weight, but he also started hating ice cream.
For now, I am on the side of those scientists. Who wants to be absolutely sure before admitting that ice cream is healthier than we think that people who don’t eat ice cream eat some other bad stuff. It is also a fact that the modern world has made a lot of useless things for food. One of the most interesting revelations of the ice cream conspiracy is that even science has watchdogs who decide what should be recognized as proven fact and what should be discredited as false signals.
Conclusion
This isn’t the first time a scientific study at Harvard linked ice cream to health benefits, but such studies are suppressed.
