THE ATLANTIC – Last summer, I got a tip about a curious scientific finding. “I’m sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this,” my tipster said.
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.
Earlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. 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. This was obviously not what a budding nutrition expert or his super-credentialed committee members were hoping to discover.
“He and his committee had done, like, every type of analysis—they had thrown every possible test at this finding to try to make it go away. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.”
Spurious effects pop up all the time in science, especially in fields like nutritional epidemiology, where the health concerns and dietary habits of hundreds of thousands of people are tracked over years and years. Still, the abject silliness of “healthy ice cream” intrigued me.
As a public-health historian, I’ve studied how teams of researchers process data, mingle them with theory, and then package the results as “what the science says … ”
READ MORE [subscription may be required].
Best Healthy Ice Creams You Can Buy To Satisfy Your Cravings
They’re VERY cool.
BY CANDACE BRAUN DAVISON, KRISTIN SALAKY, FELICIA LALOMIA AND VALERIE MAGAN : DEC 20, 2022
Just because low-calorie ice cream is, well, relatively low calorie doesn’t mean you should be downing whole pints on the regular. As with everything, moderation is key! Here are some of our favorite low-cal ice creams that actually deliver in the flavor department.
Our Top Picks
1. Halo Top – BEST OVERALL | $4 AT TARGET
2. Yasso – BEST BEST GREEK YOGURT – $5 AT WALMART
3. Englightened – BEST KETO-FRIENDLY – $5 AT WALMART
4. Arctic Zero – BEST DAIRY-FREE – $66 AT AMAZON
5. Good Humor – BEST LOW-FAT – $4 AT WALMART
See the rest of the list at DELISH.COM
