research on ice cream

Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result

Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.

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L ast 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.

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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.” I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before. (Harvard’s Nutrition Source website calls ice cream an “indulgent” dairy food that is considered an “every-so-often” treat.)

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“There are few plausible biological explanations for these results,” Ardisson Korat wrote in the brief discussion of his “unexpected” finding in his thesis. Something else grabbed my attention, though: The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect. Eager to learn more, I reached out to Ardisson Korat for an interview—I emailed him four times—but never heard back. When I contacted Tufts University, where he now works as a scientist, a press aide told me he was “not available for this.” Inevitably, my curiosity took on a different shade: Why wouldn’t a young scientist want to talk with me about his research? Just how much deeper could this bizarre ice-cream thing go?

“I still to this day don’t have an answer for it,” Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me, speaking of the association he’d stumbled upon more than 20 years earlier. “We analyzed the hell out of the data.”

Just that morning, I’d been reading one of Pereira’s early papers, on the health effects of eating dairy, because it seemed to have inspired other research that was cited in Ardisson Korat’s dissertation. But when I scrolled to the bottom of Pereira’s article, down past the headline-making conclusions, I saw in Table 5 a set of numbers that made me gasp.

Back then, Pereira was a young assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Hoping to address the newly labeled epidemics of obesity and diabetes, he initially focused his research on physical activity, but soon turned to the unsettled science of healthy eating . The status of dairy, in particular, was bogged down in simplistic and competing assumptions. “We just thought, Oh, you know, calcium and bones: It’s good for kids. But, oh, the saturated fat! Don’t eat too much dairy!  ”

From the July/August 2013 issue: How junk food can end obesity

Pereira and his co-authors tested these old ideas using data from a study, begun in 1985, that tracked the emergence of heart-disease risk factors in more than 5,000 young adults. After seeing the results, “we knew it was going to be very high-profile and controversial,” Pereira recalled. Pretty much across the board—low-fat, high-fat, milk, cheese—dairy foods appeared to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes. “I’ll tell you, this study surprised the heck out of me,” said one CNN correspondent, as Pereira’s study spiraled through the press.

But the international media coverage didn’t mention what I’d seen in Table 5. According to the numbers, tucking into a “dairy-based dessert”—a category that included foods such as pudding but consisted, according to Pereira, mainly of ice cream—was associated for overweight people with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin-resistance syndrome. It was by far the biggest effect seen in the study, 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk. “It was pretty astounding,” Pereira told me. “We thought a lot about it, because we thought, Could this actually be the case?  ”

There were reasons to be wary: The data set wasn’t huge, in epidemiological terms, and participants hadn’t reported eating that many dairy-based desserts, so the margin of error was wide. And given that the study’s overall message was sure to attract criticism—Pereira recalled getting “skewered” by antidairy activists—he had little desire to make a fuss about ice cream.

Pretty soon, Pereira’s peers found themselves in the same predicament. Building on the 2002 study and the growing interest in dairy, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health decided to break out some of their most powerful tools. Since the 1980s, Harvard’s scientists have been collecting “food-frequency questionnaires” and medical data from many thousands of nurses, dentists, and other health-care workers. These world-famous studies have fueled a stream of influential findings, including some of the data that sparked the removal of trans fats from the food supply.

The results of Harvard’s first observational study of dairy and type 2 diabetes came out in 2005 . Based on data collected from just one of their three cohorts, following men between 1986 and 1998, the authors reported that higher dairy intake, and higher low-fat-dairy intake in particular, was associated with a lower risk of diabetes. “The risk reduction was almost exclusively associated with low-fat or non-fat dairy foods,” a Harvard news bulletin explained. An article on Fox News’s website underscored the low-fat message: “There was no decrease in men who drank whole milk,” the story said.

Perhaps not whole milk, but what about butter pecan? Near the end of the Harvard paper, where the authors had arrayed the diabetes risks associated with various dairy foods, was a finding that was barely mentioned in the “almost exclusively” low-fat narrative given to reporters. Yes, according to that table, men who consumed two or more servings of skim or low-fat milk a day had a 22 percent lower risk of diabetes. But so did men who ate two or more servings of ice cream every week. Once again, the data suggested that ice cream might be the strongest diabetes prophylactic in the dairy aisle. Yet no one seemed to want to talk about it.

In the years that followed, research summaries generally agreed that high dairy intake overall was associated with a slightly reduced risk of diabetes, but called for more investigation of which specific dairy foods might have the greatest benefits. In 2014, Harvard’s nutrition team brought another dozen years of diet-tracking data to bear on this question. In this new study, total dairy consumption now seemed to have no effect, but the ice-cream signal was impossible to miss. Visible across hundreds of thousands of subjects, it all but screamed for more attention.

Following a pattern of incredulousness that was by then more than a decade old, Frank Hu, the study’s senior author and the future chair of Harvard’s nutrition department, asked the graduate student who’d led the project, Mu Chen, to double-check the data. “We were very skeptical,” Hu told me. Chen, who is no longer in academia, did not respond to interview requests, but Hu recalled that no errors in the data could be found.

The Harvard researchers didn’t like the ice-cream finding: It seemed wrong. But the same paper had given them another result that they liked much better. The team was going all in on yogurt. With a growing reputation as a boon for microbiomes , yogurt was the anti-ice-cream—the healthy person’s dairy treat.

“Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk” of type 2 diabetes, “whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not,” the 2014 paper said. “The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.”

But yogurt made so much more sense. In a way, it was confirmation of something that everyone already knew. From the start of yogurt’s entrée into the American diet, it had been perceived as an exotic food from a faraway land, quivering with vague health-giving properties. Even after being spiked with sugar in the ’70s and ’80s to better suit the U.S. market, yogurt still retained its image as an elixir.

Furthermore, a growing body of literature suggested that yogurt’s health benefits might be real. Harvard had found, a few years earlier, that eating yogurt was associated with reduced weight gain ; researchers at the university were interested in its possible effects on gut bacteria as well. Other studies—including those that first revealed the ice-cream signal—had also sketched the slender outlines of a yogurt effect. When Chen and Hu pooled together findings from this research, added in their latest data, and performed a meta-analysis, they concluded that yogurt was indeed associated with a reduced risk of diabetes—a potential benefit, they wrote, that warranted further study.

Regarding ice cream’s potential benefits, they had much less to say. I asked other experts to compare the 2014 yogurt and ice-cream findings. Kevin Klatt, a nutrition scientist at UC Berkeley, said the ice-cream effect was “more consistent” than yogurt’s across the studied cohorts. Deirdre Tobias, an epidemiologist at Harvard, the academic editor of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , and a member of the advisory committee for the 2025 update to the U.S. dietary guidelines, agreed with that assessment. Even Dagfinn Aune, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a peer reviewer of the Chen and Hu paper, said that the ice-cream effect was “similar” in magnitude to, or “slightly stronger” than, the one for yogurt.

So how did the Harvard team explain away the ice-cream finding? The theory went like this: Maybe some of the people in the study had developed health problems, such as high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol, and began avoiding ice cream on doctors’ orders (or of their own volition). Meanwhile, people who didn’t have those health problems would have had less reason to give up their cookies and cream. In that scenario, it wouldn’t be that ice cream prevented diabetes, but that being at risk of developing diabetes caused people to not eat ice cream. Epidemiologists call that “reverse causation.”

To test this idea, Hu and his co-authors set aside dietary data collected after people received these sorts of diagnoses, and then redid their calculations . The ice-cream effect shrank by half, though it was still statistically significant, and still bigger than the low-fat-dairy effect that Harvard had publicized in 2005 . In any event, if people who received adverse diagnoses cut back on their ice cream, you might expect that they’d also cut back on, say, cake and doughnuts. So shouldn’t there be mysterious protective “effects” for cake and doughnuts too? “There should be,” Mozaffarian said. “That’s why the finding for ice cream is intriguing.”

Read: How ice cream helped America at war

The new analysis was hardly a slam dunk. On paper, the yogurt and ice-cream effects still looked pretty similar. “Within the realm of statistical uncertainty, they’re identical,” Mozaffarian told me. But in the 2014 paper, he and the other authors had argued that “reverse causation may explain the findings” for ice cream. And as academia’s public-relations machinery came to life, nuance went out the window.

“Does a yogurt a day keep diabetes away?” asked the press release that went out on publication day. “Other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy did not show this association,” said Hu, the senior author, in an ice-cream-free appraisal included in the release and echoed in Harvard’s own press bulletin. “Yogurt has approached wonder-food status in recent years,” a Forbes article on the paper noted. “In the new study, other forms of dairy like milk and cheese, did not offer the same kind of protection as yogurt.”

Hu says today that the Harvard researchers felt confident in their conclusions about yogurt largely on account of their meta-analysis, and the fact that prior clinical studies and basic science research supported the idea that probiotics improve metabolic outcomes. “For ice cream, of course, there is no prior literature,” he said. Given that the ice-cream effect was diminished when they tested their reverse-causation theory, he called it “much more plausible” that yogurt would help prevent diabetes than ice cream.

After his paper was published, it didn’t take long for the Harvard group’s good news about yogurt to take hold as a dominant scientific narrative. Two years later, when a team of researchers based in the Netherlands and at Harvard analyzed all the evidence it could find on dairy and diabetes, the yogurt effect popped out. A featured graph from the team’s 2016 paper in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarizes data from about a dozen studies: As someone’s yogurt intake mounts to roughly one-third of a cup a day, their risk of getting diabetes shrinks by 14 percent.

The authors also found the ice-cream effect: Consuming as little as a half a cup per week was associated with a 19 percent reduced diabetes risk. But that finding’s epitaph was already written. The researchers concluded that consuming “dairy foods, particularly yogurt,” might help curb the diabetes epidemic, and noted that the benefits of ice cream had elsewhere been written off as a product of reverse causation. The evidence in yogurt’s favor was much better established, Sabita Soedamah-Muthu, an epidemiologist at Tilburg University and the paper’s senior author, told me. The ice-cream effect had fewer studies in its corner. “We didn’t believe in it,” she said.

There’s a thing that happens when you start writing a story about how maybe, possibly, believe it or not, ice cream might be sort of good for you, and how some of the world’s top nutritionists gathered evidence supporting that hypothesis but found reasons to look past it. You begin to ask yourself: Am I high on my own ice-cream supply? I asked the experts for a gut check. Pereira, the first to hit upon the ice-cream effect, told me that it just wasn’t the kind of result that goes down well in the “closed-minded” world of elite nutrition. “They don’t want to see it. They might ponder it for a second and kind of chuckle and not believe it,” he said. “I think that’s related to how much the field of nutritional epidemiology in the modern era is steeped in dogma.” Tobias, the journal editor and member of the 2025 U.S. dietary-guidelines advisory committee, called it “totally fair criticism” to ask why yogurt was played up while ice cream was played down. She expressed support for the Harvard team’s handling of the data, while acknowledging the tensions involved: “You don’t want to overstate stuff that you know probably has a high likelihood of bias, but you also don’t want to do the opposite and seem to be burying it, either.”

Hu, the Harvard nutritionist, said that deciding what a study means requires looking beyond the numbers to what is already known about dietary science: “You need to interpret the data in the context of the rest of the literature.” Mozaffarian, Hu’s co-author, echoed this view. Still, he noted, “you’re raising a really, really important point, which is that when, as scientists, we find things that don’t fit our hypotheses, we shouldn’t just dismiss them. We should step back and say, ‘You know, could this actually be true?’ ”

Could the idea that ice cream is metabolically protective be true? It would be pretty bonkers. Still, there are at least a few points in its favor. For one, ice cream’s glycemic index , a measure of how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. “There’s this perception that ice cream is unhealthy, but it’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” Mozaffarian said. “Given how horrible the American diet is, it’s very possible that if somebody eats ice cream and eats less starch … it could actually protect against diabetes.” The “Got Milk?” crowd also loves to talk about the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” a triple-layered biological envelope that encases the fat in mammalian milk. Some evidence suggests that dairy products in which the membrane is intact, such as ice cream, are more metabolically neutral than foods like butter, where it’s lost during the churn. (That said, regular cream has an intact membrane, and it hasn’t been consistently associated with a reduced diabetes risk.)

Then there is what might charitably be termed the “real-world evidence.” In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes . Still, the method is unlikely to take the slimming world by storm: Howard-Crow called his ice-cream bender “the most miserable dieting adventure I have ever embarked upon.”

But overall, I found more receptiveness to the ice-cream signal than I was expecting. “It’s been more or less replicated,” Pereira noted. “Whether it’s causal or not still remains an open question.” Mozaffarian agreed: “I think probably the ice cream is still reverse causation,” he said. “But I’m not sure, and I’m kind of annoyed by that.” If this had been a patented drug, he continued, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”

To be clear, none of the experts interviewed for this article is inclined to believe that the ice-cream effect is real, although sometimes for reasons that differ from Hu’s. Pereira, for example, pointed out that people aren’t always truthful when they’re quizzed on what they eat. His 2002 study found that overweight and obese people reported eating fewer dairy-based desserts than other people. “I don’t believe that the heavier people consume less desserts,” he said. “I believe they underreport more.” If that’s true, then admitting to eating ice cream might correlate with metabolic health—and the ice-cream effect would be, in its way, a marker of fat stigma in America.

From the June 2000 issue: Ice-cream making for beginners

The problem with this line of thinking is that once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into the science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts. If the ice-cream effect can be set aside, how should we think about other signals produced by the same research tools? “I don’t know what I believe about yogurt,” Tobias told me. It’s widely known that yogurt eaters on average are healthier, leaner, wealthier, better educated, more physically active, more likely to read labels, more likely to be female, and less likely to smoke or drink or eat Big Macs than never-yogurters. “You can’t confidently adjust away all of that kind of stuff,” said Klatt, the UC Berkeley nutritionist.

In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.

The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Ice-Cream Conspiracy.”

Is ice cream really healthy? Here’s what the evidence says

Lead for Evidence-Based Medicine and Nutrition, Aston Medical School, Aston University

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Duane Mellor is a member of the British Dietetic Association

Aston University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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Ice cream lovers worldwide were probably rejoicing when a recent article suggested that indulging in your favourite flavour might be healthy . The article drew upon a 2018 doctoral thesis, which suggested that people with type 2 diabetes who consumed more ice cream had lower risks of heart disease. But as exciting as this sounds for those of us who sometimes enjoy indulging in a bowl of raspberry ripple, when we actually examine the study, it’s likely this link comes down to variety of other factors.

The 2018 research the article drew upon looked at data from the Nurses’ Health Study I and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study . These were two large observational studies conducted by researchers at Harvard University which began in 1976 and 1986 and went on for around 20 years. The purpose of these studies was to track the health of participants over a long period of time, and uncover whether there were links between certain diseases and lifestyle factors (such as diet).

To conduct their analysis, the researchers only included data from participants of these two studies who reported having type 2 diabetes when the studies began – so around 16,000 people total. The participants with diabetes had also provided information about which foods they typically ate over the previous year. They were not instructed to eat or avoid ice cream at any point.

The researchers found that those who ate ice cream no more than twice a week appeared to be 12% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease, compared to those who didn’t eat ice cream.

But it’s important to note that this link between ice cream and heart disease only became apparent when other aspects of a person’s health, including how healthily they ate, were taken into account. This suggests that eating an overall healthy diet is perhaps more important in reducing cardiovascular disease risk in people with type 2 diabetes, than eating ice cream.

It could also be the case that participants who reported eating ice cream before joining the study could have stopped eating ice cream altogether just after joining the study – possible because they may have been made aware they were at greater risk of cardiovascular disease. This would then make it appear that eating ice cream was linked with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, when the reverse was true.

It’s also important to make clear that this was an observational study – meaning that it can only show an association between eating ice cream and lower risk of heart disease. It can’t actually prove eating ice cream in and of itself is directly responsible for decreasing risk of cardiovascular disease in people with type 2 diabetes.

To be able to test if ice cream has an effect on cardiovascular disease risk, it would probably need to go through a clinical trial, where one group ate ice cream as part of their diet and the other group ate a placebo for ice cream. This would be practically difficult to do, and given the potential costs is unlikely to ever happen without significant funding from the food industry.

Can ice cream be healthy?

Surprisingly, there have not been a lot of studies that have looked at the specific effect of ice cream on health. Studies that have done typically only had participants consume quite a small amount (around less than a quarter of a serving per day) – meaning it was not enough to develop any meaningful conclusions about its effect.

But one Italian study suggested that consuming more ice cream may be linked to a higher risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver (a risk factor for type 2 diabetes and heart disease). However, the researchers also found that this link existed for other foods, such as red meat – suggesting that the quality of a person’s overall diet may matter more for health than a specific food.

Ice cream is also considered an ultra-processed food – meaning that because of the processing methods used to create it, it’s typically very high in calories, fat and sugar. Ultra-processed foods have been linked to a range of health issues, including increased risk of developing both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease . Nutrition guidelines also encourage us to limit our intake of sugar and fat because of this. This makes it pretty likely that too much ice cream may have a negative effect on health.

But it may not all be bad news if you’re someone who enjoys dairy products in general. Evidence for the potential benefits of dairy fat has been growing over the past 20 years, with research showing fermented dairy products – such as some types of yoghurt – and cheese in particular may reduce risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes . However, more research will be needed to see whether ice cream may be associated with similar benefits because of it’s dairy fat content.

Research also shows that diets containing calcium-rich foods are associated with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease . But there are many other foods – including dairy, pulses and nuts – which are also sources of calcium. These also have other nutritional benefits without the negative high sugar content of ice cream.

While it can be exciting to see headlines claiming our favourite foods may have unexpected health benefits , it’s important to analyse the research. Often, the effects of one food can be exaggerated by research method errors or other factors – such as the participant’s diet or lifestyle.

At the moment, we simply don’t have enough good quality evidence to suggest that ice cream definitely has any health benefits. But a couple of small portions a week – paired with an otherwise healthy diet and exercise regime – is unlikely to do much harm.

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Is ice cream really healthy? Here's what the evidence says

by Duane Mellor, The Conversation

Ice cream lovers worldwide were probably rejoicing when a recent article suggested that indulging in your favorite flavor might be healthy . The article drew upon a 2018 doctoral thesis, which suggested that people with type 2 diabetes who consumed more ice cream had lower risks of heart disease. But as exciting as this sounds for those of us who sometimes enjoy indulging in a bowl of raspberry ripple, when we actually examine the study, it's likely this link comes down to variety of other factors.

The 2018 research the article drew upon looked at data from the Nurses' Health Study I and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study . These were two large observational studies conducted by researchers at Harvard University which began in 1976 and 1986 and went on for around 20 years. The purpose of these studies was to track the health of participants over a long period of time, and uncover whether there were links between certain diseases and lifestyle factors (such as diet).

To conduct their analysis, the researchers only included data from participants of these two studies who reported having type 2 diabetes when the studies began—so around 16,000 people total. The participants with diabetes had also provided information about which foods they typically ate over the previous year. They were not instructed to eat or avoid ice cream at any point.

The researchers found that those who ate ice cream no more than twice a week appeared to be 12% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease , compared to those who didn't eat ice cream.

But it's important to note that this link between ice cream and heart disease only became apparent when other aspects of a person's health, including how healthily they ate, were taken into account. This suggests that eating an overall healthy diet is perhaps more important in reducing cardiovascular disease risk in people with type 2 diabetes, than eating ice cream.

It could also be the case that participants who reported eating ice cream before joining the study could have stopped eating ice cream altogether just after joining the study—possible because they may have been made aware they were at greater risk of cardiovascular disease. This would then make it appear that eating ice cream was linked with lower risk of cardiovascular disease, when the reverse was true.

It's also important to make clear that this was an observational study—meaning that it can only show an association between eating ice cream and lower risk of heart disease. It can't actually prove eating ice cream in and of itself is directly responsible for decreasing risk of cardiovascular disease in people with type 2 diabetes.

To be able to test if ice cream has an effect on cardiovascular disease risk , it would probably need to go through a clinical trial, where one group ate ice cream as part of their diet and the other group ate a placebo for ice cream. This would be practically difficult to do, and given the potential costs is unlikely to ever happen without significant funding from the food industry .

Can ice cream be healthy?

Surprisingly, there have not been a lot of studies that have looked at the specific effect of ice cream on health. Studies that have done typically only had participants consume quite a small amount (around less than a quarter of a serving per day)—meaning it was not enough to develop any meaningful conclusions about its effect.

But one Italian study suggested that consuming more ice cream may be linked to a higher risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver (a risk factor for type 2 diabetes and heart disease). However, the researchers also found that this link existed for other foods, such as red meat—suggesting that the quality of a person's overall diet may matter more for health than a specific food .

Ice cream is also considered an ultra-processed food —meaning that because of the processing methods used to create it, it's typically very high in calories, fat and sugar. Ultra-processed foods have been linked to a range of health issues, including increased risk of developing both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease . Nutrition guidelines also encourage us to limit our intake of sugar and fat because of this. This makes it pretty likely that too much ice cream may have a negative effect on health.

But it may not all be bad news if you're someone who enjoys dairy products in general. Evidence for the potential benefits of dairy fat has been growing over the past 20 years, with research showing fermented dairy products —such as some types of yogurt—and cheese in particular may reduce risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes . However, more research will be needed to see whether ice cream may be associated with similar benefits because of it's dairy fat content.

Research also shows that diets containing calcium-rich foods are associated with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease . But there are many other foods—including dairy, pulses and nuts—which are also sources of calcium. These also have other nutritional benefits without the negative high sugar content of ice cream.

While it can be exciting to see headlines claiming our favorite foods may have unexpected health benefits , it's important to analyze the research. Often, the effects of one food can be exaggerated by research method errors or other factors—such as the participant's diet or lifestyle.

At the moment, we simply don't have enough good quality evidence to suggest that ice cream definitely has any health benefits. But a couple of small portions a week—paired with an otherwise healthy diet and exercise regime—is unlikely to do much harm.

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Smithsonian Voices

From the Smithsonian Museums

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

The Strangely Scientific Endeavor of Making Ice Cream

Ice cream’s texture is the result of the same processes that govern concepts like forest recovery, rock formation and sub-zero survival in animals.

Cypress Hansen

When you think about ice cream, you might marvel at the plethora of available flavors. Or relish in the refreshment a scoop brings on a hot summer day. But there’s more to ice cream than meets the mouth. Its unique and delectable texture is the result of the same physical and chemical processes that govern concepts like forest recovery, rock formation and sub-zero survival in animals.

Here are five cool connections to ponder while you enjoy your next cone, cup or pint.

Rock-y road

One of the main ingredients in ice cream is water, mostly in the form of microscopic ice crystals. The size of those crystals plays a big role in ice cream quality. Large crystals create a grainy texture, whereas smaller crystals — as little as blood cells — make it velvety smooth. So how do ice cream makers keep the little ice nuggets from growing larger than a dozen micrometers?

One way is knowing that ice is just as much a mineral as quartz or graphite. And in some ways, it behaves like them too. “Looking at ice cream under a microscope is not that different from looking at a piece of granite or other rock that’s cooled from magma in the Earth,” says Jeffrey Post , Curator-in-Charge of Gems and Minerals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History .

When minerals solidify from liquid lava or magma, “their crystals provide certain clues about the conditions under which they formed,” said Post. For example, thick, gooey magma cooling slowly deep in the earth, allows crystals to grow. Thin and runny lava at the surface cools and hardens much faster, producing rocks with smaller crystals.

Sweeteners and stabilizers thicken ice cream to slow crystal growth, but another way keep the crystals small is to speed up the freezing process. Adding liquid nitrogen, which freezes the ice cream on contact, has increased in popularity over the years. Its extremely cold temperature creates smooth ice cream in only a few minutes.

Mint chip or wood chips?

Another way to keep crystals from growing is to chop them down as soon as they start to form in the mixing container. In the first stage of ice cream creation, called dynamic freezing, the mixer constantly scrapes newly formed crystals from the walls of the bucket, churning them into the middle of the mixture. This not only stops crystals from growing thick on the inner walls, but also creates more nuclei, or crystal origin points, for liquid water molecules to freeze onto. As Post explains, “all of those smaller crystals are now competing with each other for the remaining water molecules, so none of them can grow really large.”

This process closely resembles the effect that clear-cutting, hurricanes or intense wildfires can have on forests. When a stand of trees is chopped, burned or blown down, densely packed saplings grow in its place at a uniform pace. It can take several decades before the weaker ones die off and make room for the stronger individuals. In the meantime, the regenerating “second growth” forest is stunted as the overcrowded trees compete for limited resources. For forests, slow growth and varied sizes generally yield a healthier ecosystem. But for ice cream, clear cuts and competition are key to a creamy texture.

Chocolate chip antifreeze

Once ice cream is made, it’s best to eat it fresh and all in one go. But if filling up on frozen desserts isn’t an option, you must store them, sometimes for weeks or months. During this time, the temperature of the ice cream might fluctuate as freezer doors open and close. If it melts even a little, the ice will recrystallize, growing bigger crystals over time. The result: an icy, crunchy texture that just isn’t worth six dollars per pint.

By slowing down the movement of liquid water molecules within the ice cream mixture, thickeners and stabilizers keep things running smoothly for long periods of time. But when that’s not enough, ice cream makers have looked to cold-adapted wildlife for help.

Several species of frogs, insects and plants evolved antifreeze proteins in their tissues to help them survive in frigid conditions. These proteins surround and bind to ice crystals as soon as they form in the body. By blocking liquid water molecules from bonding with the budding crystals, the antifreeze allows organisms to avoid cell damage and even death.

Antifreeze proteins originally discovered in cold-water fish and then synthesized in the lab via genetically modified yeasts have been applied to ice creams worldwide to inhibit ice recrystallization.

Physics and cream

Oil and water repel each other. So why doesn’t ice cream — a mixture of mostly ice and milk fats — separate into two layers? The answer can be found in its microscopic structure.

If you shake a bottle with oil and vinegar in it, the oil breaks up into small, spherical droplets. If left undisturbed, the droplets will eventually coalesce back into a layer at the surface. But the two liquids can appear to become one if they are vigorously shaken or blended at high speed. They become an emulsion — an even dispersion of two unmixable liquids.

Most unmixable mixtures are thermodynamically unstable, meaning they will eventually revert to a simpler, more organized structure with one liquid sitting on top of the other. But stable emulsions are different. No matter how long you wait, the fats won’t rise to the top. Coconut water and homogenized milk are two familiar examples of stable emulsions.

These oil-in-water substances stay evenly dispersed partly because they contain natural emulsifying proteins which work in a similar way as antifreeze proteins. Instead of binding to the ice, emulsifiers latch onto the fat droplets and lower the tension between the two liquids, preventing the fat from aggregating and forming its own layer.

In ice cream, milk proteins keep things relatively stable. But extra emulsifiers like lecithin or casein are often needed to help another major ingredient — air — stay in the mix. Tiny air bubbles make ice cream more scoopable and help soft serve keep its shape, but only if they also remain small and evenly distributed amongst the fat and ice.

Cookies and Crystalline

Naturally occurring ice comes in many different shapes and sizes, from hollow columns and needles to platelets and bullet-shaped rosettes. Whichever shape an ice crystal takes, it largely depends on the humidity and temperature surrounding the crystal during formation. Higher humidity produces bigger, more elaborate snowflakes .

Most of these crystal shapes need time, space and moist air to grow or branch out, and a churning ice cream machine furnishes no such amenities. Instead, ice cream crystals more closely resemble the simple prisms or platelets that form in very cold, dry conditions. The constant movement by the mixer also wears the crystals down like the ocean wears down sand, resulting in microscopic, irregular grains.

While the ice crystals in your sundae may look like nothing more than tiny pebbles, they do make great food for thought. “All processes on Earth are controlled by the same physics and chemistry, whether it’s ice cream, rock formation inside the Earth or weather up in the sky,” said Post. “If we understand the physics and chemistry, then we can understand our world — and we can create a better ice cream.” And who doesn’t want better ice cream?

Related stories: Why Scientists Find Snowflakes Cool How Seven of Nature’s Coolest Species Weather the Cold How to Identify Rocks and Other Questions From Our Readers

Cypress Hansen | | READ MORE

Cypress Hansen is an intern in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. She has also written for Knowable Magazine, Mercury News, Mongabay and Scientific American. Cypress recently graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an MS in science communication. She also holds a BS in marine science from Eckerd College, in Saint Petersburg, Florida. You can find her at CypressWritesScience.com

Advanced Methods in Ice Cream Analysis: a Review

• Published: 09 June 2018
• Volume 11 , pages 3224–3234, ( 2018 )

Cite this article

• Aziz Homayouni 1 ,
• Mina Javadi 1 ,
• Fereshteh Ansari 2 , 3 ,
• Hadi Pourjafar 4 ,
• Maryam Jafarzadeh 1 &
• Ali Barzegar 5  

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Ice cream is a complex food colloid that consists of an unfrozen serum phase, ice crystals, fat globules, and air bubbles. The main ingredients of ice cream are fat, milk solid-not-fat, sucrose, stabilizer, and emulsifier. Various steps in the manufacturing process, including mixing, pasteurization, homogenization, aging, freezing, and hardening, contribute to the development of this structure. In general, the analytical methods can be divided into three groups: chemical (volatile and non-volatile compounds), physical (rheological and color analysis), and structural analysis. The aim of this study was to review the new methods that were used for the analysis of ice cream.

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Ice Cream Structure

Ice Cream and Frozen Desserts

Analyzing frozen desserts.

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Aziz Homayouni, Mina Javadi & Maryam Jafarzadeh

Research Center for Evidence Based Medicine, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran

Fereshteh Ansari

Iranian EBM Centre: A Joanna Briggs Institute Affiliated Group, Tabriz, Iran

Department of Food Sciences, Maragheh University of Medical Sciences, Maragheh, Iran

Hadi Pourjafar

Department of Community Nutrition, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran

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Aziz Homayouni declares that he has no conflict of interest. Mina Javadi declares that she has no conflict of interest. Fereshteh Ansari declares that she has no conflict of interest. Hadi Pourjafar declares that he has no conflict of interest. Maryam Jafarzadeh declares that she has no conflict of interest. Ali Barzegar declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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Homayouni, A., Javadi, M., Ansari, F. et al. Advanced Methods in Ice Cream Analysis: a Review. Food Anal. Methods 11 , 3224–3234 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-018-1292-0

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Received : 19 February 2018

Accepted : 14 May 2018

Published : 09 June 2018

Issue Date : November 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-018-1292-0

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• News & Analysis on the Dairy Industry & Markets

‘The prospects are tantalizing’: Prebiotic fiber can make low-calorie ice cream as creamy as the full-fat stuff

07-May-2024 - Last updated on 10-May-2024 at 14:46 GMT

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The study also suggested that combining multiple types of dietary fibers can bring about a multitude of sensory and physical benefits, with a potential to elevate the low-cal ice cream category to new heights.

Dietary fiber promotes gut health and immunity and is mostly found in plant foods, such as fruit, vegetables, legumes and whole grains. In ice cream, dietary fibers are used as fat replacers, but their effects on ice cream’s sensory profile have been less well-documented.

Dietary fibers also have functional benefits, making them a sought-after ingredient in food products targeting health-conscious consumers. Meanwhile, nutritional research has found that the Western diet is associated with a lower intake of dietary fibers and an increased risk of chronic illnesses like obesity, diabetes and cancer [1] ​ ​. In the US, for example, the low consumption of dietary fiber is a public health concern [2] ​ ​.

With health and wellness being a main trend topic in the food and beverage industry in recent years, the potential of low-calorie ice cream has been bolstered, but formulators often face challenges in creating low-fat options that are as palatable as the full-fat alternatives on the market. For example, achieving the right consistency with minimal fat content may require the use of artificial emulsifiers, which could compromise clean-label claims.

Judging the sensory properties was a 12-person panel of men and women aged between 24 and 49, who ranked the ice cream based on 10 factors - whiteness, opacity, hardness on spooning, creaminess, gumminess, coldness, sandiness, melting rate, sweetness, and vanilla flavor.

The results showed that low-fat ice cream made with inulin was ‘entirely comparable’ to the full-fat ice cream in sensory terms, making the ingredient ‘a genuine potential fat substitute in ice cream production’ according to the authors.

Inulin is a prebiotic fiber that’s most often extracted from chicory but is also found in agave and artichoke. In the nutrition and supplement space, it is considered a low-fat, low-calorie plant-derived source of fiber that has gut health benefits similar to other dietary fibers, e.g. it improves digestive health, lowers blood sugar, reduces the risk of cancer, and more * ​. Its flavor is neutral to mildly sweet, and it has excellent water solubility.

Meanwhile, both the inulin- and acacia-fortified batches were almost indistinguishable from the full-fat ice cream in terms of color, but the oat- and apple-fortified samples were noticeably different. The latter two were also described as harder and colder by the judging panel, while the acacia-fortified sample was perceived as less hard and less cold compared to the full-fat sample.

The batch made with inulin was also softer and started to melt earlier than the full-fat version, though inulin-fortified ice cream was the least prone to forming ice crystals due to its solubility, even when compared to full-fat ice cream.

The findings suggest that the right pairings of dietary fibers could bring about superior low-calorie ice cream without resorting to artificial ingredients and while potentially enabling health claims on pack.

“Looking ahead, the prospects are tantalizing,” the authors concluded. “Further research could investigate optimizing fiber combinations to balance health benefits and sensory delight perfectly. Understanding the dynamics of fiber interactions and their impact on freezing and melting behaviors opens avenues for innovation, paving the way for a new era of guilt-free frozen desserts.”

Source: Dietary fibers effects on physical, thermal, and sensory properties of low-fat ice cream Authors: Roberta Tolve, Matteo Zanoni, Giovanna Ferrentino, Rodrigo Gonzalez-Ortega, Lucia Sportiello, Matteo Scampicchio, Fabio Favati Published: LWT, Volume 199, 2024, 116094, ISSN 0023-6438, DOI: 10.1016/j.lwt.2024.116094

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Is ice-cream good for you? Scientists divided on claims about health benefits

Suggestions in the US that eating the dessert can be beneficial have been greeted by a ripple of scepticism from British experts

Delicious, sweet and full of saturated fat, the concept of ice-cream as a health food is as ridiculous as it is compelling.

But in what will be welcome news for many as Britain basks in warmer weather this week, an American public health historian has revealed how numerous studies over several decades have repeatedly found mysterious potential health benefits of the frozen dessert – only to be glossed over by scientists.

In an article for the Atlantic magazine , David Merritt Johns said he first started looking into the claims last summer, after hearing about some 2018 research by a Harvard doctoral student which had found that eating half a cup (64g) of ice-cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems for diabetics.

On further investigation, Johns discovered that the link was in fact more than 20 years old. Mark Pereira, the epidemiologist who came across it, told Johns that despite thorough analysis: “I still to this day don’t have an answer for it.”

Pereira found that dairy-based desserts such as ice-cream were associated with heavily reduced chances of developing insulin-resistance syndrome (a precursor to diabetes) among overweight people, but the alleged health benefits were not publicised. Scientists preferred to focus on the supposed health benefits of yoghurt.

“ Could the idea that ice-cream is metabolically protective be true? It would be pretty bonkers. Still, there are at least a few points in its favour,” writes Johns, citing the glycaemic index of ice-cream , which is lower than brown rice, and the supposed benefits of dairy products where the membrane is intact.

But the findings have so far received a slightly frosty reception in Britain. “As an academic public health doctor, I’m not going to be rushing out to eat more ice-cream based on this research,” said John Ford, academic public health doctor and senior clinical lecturer at Queen Mary University London.

“There are lots of other potential explanations – it may be that people are more likely to have an ice-cream to cool down after a walk or some exercise, or it may be that people who tend to choose ice-cream as a dessert instead of a high-calorie slab of chocolate cake are also likely to substitute other high-fat foods.”

It would be interesting to look at the types of people who were more likely to eat ice-cream and the other lifestyle choices they made, Ford added.

Dr Duane Mellor, a senior lecturer and dietitian at Aston Medical School, cautioned against homing in on the health benefits of a single type of food, and warned of the potential inaccuracy of food intake studies, which are usually conducted using questionnaires.

He said: “The problem ultimately is that we try to link a health effect or benefit to a single food, when in reality we eat a variety of foods, and it is our whole dietary pattern that counts.”

Mellor did concede, however, that ice-cream “may contain some nutrients which could be beneficial” such as calcium, and that it had a low glycaemic index, but that this was is likely to be outweighed by its sugar and calorie content.

“So, overall we should not be considering ice-cream as a health food, only something which can be enjoyed in small amounts as part of an overall health dietary pattern,” he said.

The Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England declined to comment.

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Is America’s love of ice cream melting away? Unilever’s break-up with Ben & Jerry’s isn’t the only sign.

U nilever is breaking up with ice cream. But it’s not only the international conglomerate that is cooling on the sweet treat — it turns out that Americans have been slowly drifting away from ice cream over the past few decades. 

The owner of many household brands, Unilever announced Tuesday that it’s breaking off its ice cream business, which includes the supermarket staple Ben & Jerry’s, and will shed 7,500 jobs . The company said separating the ice cream line will allow Unilever to become “a simpler, more focused company.”

Also read: Unilever to cut 7,500 jobs and split off arm that makes Ben & Jerry’s

But analysts also said part of the reason was that Unilever’s ice cream products have not been selling well over the past year or so. Ben & Jerry’s did not do well last fiscal year, nor did Unilever’s two other ice cream brands, Magnum and Wall’s. That could be because consumers were facing higher prices. Prices in Unilever’s ice cream division were up 8.8% in the last fiscal year, while the volume of sales dipped by 6%, the company said in its latest earnings call in February. Unilever said it raised prices after input costs went up. 

Unilever Chief Financial Officer Fernando Fernandez said that “it has been a very disappointing year for ice cream” when it comes to how consumers responded to the price hikes compared to other household items. Consumers have been opting instead for store brands following the price increase, he said. Researchers have pointed out in the past that ice cream is a product that people will buy less of when its price goes up.

Unilever did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company has owned Ben & Jerry’s for 24 years, and the separation could represent a “significant change,”  but Ben & Jerry’s is “well-positioned to grow” its global company, a Ben & Jerry’s spokesperson said in an email to MarketWatch.

It’s also true that Americans have been eating less ice cream in the past few decades. 

On a per capita basis, Americans ate 22 pounds of ice cream — including low-fat versions — in 2022, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture . That’s down by about five pounds from 2000, when it was 27.5 pounds, and down by seven pounds from 1994, when it was 29.4 pounds — the highest personal intake since the ice cream consumption data became available in 1975. 

One type of ice cream in particular seems to be losing its appeal: what the USDA calls “regular” ice cream, or the traditional kind made with full-fat milk. This is the type of ice cream that has been sold in your neighborhood ice cream parlor since your grandmother’s time — it is sweet, creamy and contains full fat. 

In 2022, Americans ate an average of 12.7 pounds of “regular”  ice cream per capita, down from 18.2 pounds in 1975. 

Why are Americans moving away from ice cream? Despite its recent price increases, Unilever itself has a theory — the summer is getting too hot; so hot that people are not buying ice cream, its former CFO Graeme Pitkethly told journalists in July 2023, when heat waves were making their way across Europe. “There’s a sweet spot for temperature, ” said Pitkethly. “When it gets too hot, people move away from ice cream and buy a cold drink instead.”

While global summer temperatures broke records in the past few years, people may also be moving away from ice cream because they are gradually moving away from fat and dairy as a whole. A 2022 McKinsey report showed that many U.S. consumers said they were buying more premium ice cream brands for health-related reasons, because those brands often contain low-carb or low-fat ingredients. 

Consumers, especially millennials, have also become increasingly interested in buying products that they feel align with their values, and for some, that means going dairy-free, McKinsey found.  “Environmental, health, and animal-welfare concerns come together in shoppers’ growing interest in dairy-free and plant-based yogurt and ice cream,” the McKinsey researchers wrote. 

However, Americans’ consumption of low-fat and nonfat ice cream is relatively flat. Since 1975, consumption of alternatives has been hovering around 6.5 pounds a year per person, according to the USDA. 

It could also be that people are eating less sugar, a 2023 analysis by USDA’s Economic Research Service found. People have eaten fewer frozen dairy products over the past 20 years, which is in line with the downward trend of people eating less caloric sweeteners such as corn syrup, honey and sugar, ERS said. The consumption of those sweeteners went down from 150.9 pounds per capita in 2000 to 127.4 pounds in 2021, according to the USDA data. 

But it may not entirely be the case that people have fallen out of love with ice cream, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist and public health advocate as well as a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. 

The U.S. is still up there among the countries that consume the most ice cream, according to McKinsey, and the market is growing roughly in line with the speed at which the economy grows — about 2% each year.  

“Yes, consumption is down, but consumption of practically everything is down,” Nestle told MarketWatch in an email. People feel stressed about the economy, and more people are taking Ozempic to lose weight , she added.

The company behind Ozempic, Novo Nordisk told MarketWatch in an email that Ozempic is not approved for weight management, and pointed to another Novo Nordisk drug, Wegovy, which it said is “indicated to reduce excess body weight and maintain weight reduction long term.”

People’s belief that dairy products are not good for them could also potentially play a part in the decline of ice cream consumption, but it could also be related to something positive from a public health standpoint, Nestle said. 

“Maybe the eat-less message has gotten out, finally,” Nestle said. “If so, I hope whatever is getting substituted is healthier, at least.”

We want to hear from readers who have stories to share about the effects of increasing costs and a changing economy. If you’d like to share your experience, write to  [email protected] . Please include your name and the best way to reach you. A reporter may be in touch.

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Local ice cream company creates limited-run flavor benefitting Magee research

Oh, Baby ice cream

PITTSBURGH — A Pittsburgh-area ice cream company and a women’s health research institute teamed up to create a sweet treat that will benefit research and patient care initiatives.

On Wednesday, Millie’s Homemade Icecream and the Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation announced the launch of ‘Oh, Baby.’ The ice cream was developed to celebrate Mother’s Day and benefit women’s health research and patient care initiatives at Magee-Womens.

The purple ice cream is cream is vanilla flavored and loaded with bits of frosted birthday cake and rainbow sprinkles. It’s available throughout May, while supplies last, at select Millie’s Scoop Shops and other wholesale partners that stock Millie’s varieties, like Giant Eagle.

“Millie’s is so excited to partner with Magee-Womens for the month of May,” said Lauren Townsend, co-founder of Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream. “Together, we’ve created ‘Oh, Baby,’ a flavor that is not only fun and delicious, but reflective of the tireless work of the Magee community to help women and babies thrive.”

Millie’s will donate a portion of sales to support the Women’s Health Impact Fund at Magee-Womens.

“We are excited about this opportunity to partner with Millie’s,” said Michael Annichine, CEO & president of Magee-Womens Research Institute & Foundation. “This collaboration is such a fun, and delicious way, to raise awareness of the critical need for women’s health research, and to celebrate all the new moms and babies that we will welcome at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital this month.”

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'Oh, Baby!': Millie's ice cream flavor celebrates Mother's Day, women's health

Megan Swift is a TribLive reporter covering trending news in Western Pennsylvania. A Murrysville native, she joined the Trib full time in 2023 after serving as editor-in-chief of The Daily Collegian at Penn State. She previously worked as a Jim Borden Scholarship intern at the Trib for three summers. She can be reached at [email protected].

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