Greg Shahade

Ice cream is actually one of the healthiest foods in existence, judging by a multitude of recent research articles. There was a very highly publicized article that came out in 2018 out of Harvard. It was for a student's dissertation, he found that ice cream was inversely associated with heart disease. The nutrition department and the student himself tried repeatedly to "make the association go away" with different analysis, and checking his work. But it didn't. Not only was ice cream reported as beneficial, it was actually one of the most beneficial dairy products analyzed. With up to a 12% reduction in heart disease risk for having >2 servings of ice cream per week. This wasn't the first study to find benefits of ice cream, and it also wasn't the last. In a 2013 meta analysis of studies, they also found a protective effect of ice cream on diabetes. You can see the bias against ice cream, as they don't even mention it in the main page. That's despite ice cream showing one of the BEST results of any food studied for diabetes risk. Another study from 2014 showed the same thing. Again, this is a meta analysis, not just one study. They are pooling together all of the studies on ice cream and diabetes and still finding this. The best result of any dairy food studied - here with a 32% reduction in diabetes risk. The bias against ice cream is very strong in these studies. A 2016 study once again showing the same benefit of ice cream for diabetes risk. They say that the study above (Chen et al) showed "attenuated association" once diet collection information was stopped after hypertension or high cholesterol diagnosis. They argue that this means that the association is invalid. But not only did they not try to dismiss any other food studied like this, but this is just objectively not true (see above - there still was an association). They also buried their results on ice cream in the supplementary tables so it didn't even make the paper. That's probably because they didn't like the fact that once again, ice cream intake was inversely and strongly associated with diabetes risk. So you really can't argue that there was some kind of agenda in favor of ice cream here. More recent studies show the same thing. A 2019 paper again showed a lower risk of diabetes with increased ice cream consumption. And again, they put this information at the very end in the supplementary tables to try to hide it. Finally, the most recent study in 2024 showed the STRONGEST association for ice cream's protective effect on diabetes. There was a linear dose response. That means more ice cream = less diabetes, straight up. In fact, there was a 50% reduction in risk for having one serving per day. Which, as you could guess by this point, was the greatest risk reduction of any dairy food studied. Why would ice cream actually be good for you? My main guess is the unique protective fats in dairy, that are abundant in ice cream. ◇ C15 ◇ C17 ◇ CLA ◇ TVA ◇ TPA are fats almost exclusively in dairy fat, and all have unique effects. ◇ Mitochondrial enhancing ◇ Anti-inflammatory ◇ Anti-thrombotic ◇ Lipid lowering ◇ Fat burning ◇ Cancer preventing I've covered these all at length in other content. Of course, this is all observational. This is simply seeing what people eat and then seeing what happens to them. It's not an experiment. That is definitely a limitation. However, when you see the same association, consistently, across decades, regardless of analysis and confounding adjustment, you probably have something real. This is not to say everyone should go and immediately pound gallons of ice cream for invincibility. But... it does mean having reasonable amounts of ice cream is likely good for you.