Corby Kummer: Is Ice Cream Healthy?

Five years ago, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat conducted a study that came to an unexpected conclusion. He found that eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems among diabetics. In other words — it showed eating ice cream as good for you.

“If you have ice cream, you are at less risk of developing diabetes and researchers could not explain it away,” said food writer Corby Kummer on Boston Public Radio.

Many researchers couldn’t give a rebuttal to the old wives’ tale on ice cream being healthy, even after throughly analyzing studies from over 20 years ago.

The Atlantic story takes on the beloved treat of ice cream and while it is not typically considered a "healthy" food, it is evident that ice cream in moderation and as part of a balanced diet is unlikely to have a significant negative impact on a person’s health. Whether it actively increases the health of a person is a debate.

“The story in our beloved Atlantic was really good and provocative. It was [examining] what researchers do when they see an obviously robust result they can’t filter out. They can’t change the controls to make it [the results] go away. And in this case, it was that eating ice cream, I think it was three times a week ... you’re welcome to do it,” Kummer said.

Kummer himself could not give a direct answer on whether or not ice cream is healthy and quoted Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts' nutrition school, where he said that if ice cream had been a patented drug, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized control trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”

He gives praise to the Atlantic story and said it’s a great example of “what it is like to try to produce meaningful nutritional research results when there are so few randomized controlled trials, and there’s so little money to do it.”

At the moment, there isn’t a concrete answer. But regardless, Kummer plans to go to Toscanini’s in Cambridge and said you should too.

“That’s the place to have it 3 times a week.”

Corby Kummer is executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. He's a regular guest on Boston Public Radio.