Just one more reason to hate Big Science™

Okay, so this article from The Atlantic is ridiculously long.

You can read the entire thing if you like, but let me sum it up for you:

Dairy is good for you, even if it has high saturated fat.

The positives of dairy, even in super sugary ice cream, help prevent heart disease in diabetics.

Dairy foods of all kinds help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome.

It started in 2018 when a student noticed some discrepancies in his research:

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.

This goes against conventional teaching for the past two decades: That's why ice cream is marketed as a sinful indulgence, not a health food.

But Korat dug deeper and found several older studies that showed health benefits. One of them was from Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota who had done research on dairy's benefits in 2002 for Harvard:

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? "

The scientists publicized some of the results from this study, but the part about ice cream didn't seem right, so they left it out and didn't talk about it with the press. Even though it was the biggest factor in the study.

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.

Where actual science had enlightened, Big Science and the Fake News quickly moved in for damage control.

But the international media coverage didn't mention what I'd seen in Table 5.

THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!

It just goes to show you how biases can affect everything.

The study mentioned in this story is nearly 20 years old. But the only result they pushed in the media – the narrative I'm sure you've heard for 20 years now – is that "low-fat" dairy is good for you. And people believe it, because all those low-fat yogurt places started popping up everywhere around 2006!

But the reality is if the study is to be believed, that ice cream is also just as good for you period, NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF ICE CREAM.

As for fro-yo, let's talk about that.

In 2005, more Harvard experts dug more into dairy's effects on insulin resistance:

...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.

Then in 2014:

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.

THEY WANTED TO KEEP THE TRUTH FROM US!

All those wasted years...

Instead of telling us that ice cream is amazing and wonderful and a gift from a good God in heaven above who loves us, they decided to promote yogurt for the heck of it:

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.

I should have known the people behind yogurt were to blame for this!

Yogurt is a sad excuse for a dairy treat. A disgusting imitation of the real thing. It's supposed to be the "healthy alternative."

They just pushed yogurt because it sounded healthier. Not because there was any science behind it.

And this was, again, HARVARD "experts"!

Here's more:

"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."

Just in case Covid didn't do it for you, just know that The Science™ hates you.

Scientists have been lying to you about the health benefits of ice cream for decades just because they thought it sounded better to promote yogurt or even go all out against dairy.

It's absolute insanity.

So cut loose and have yourself a cone tonight!