Before I had kids, I was extremely skinny, and my favorite food was ice cream. After I had children, I ceased being extremely skinny, and I pretty much removed ice cream from my diet as I constantly sought the holy grail of my pre-pregnancy figure. It never occurred to me that, back in the day, I might not have been skinny despite ice cream. Instead, I might have been skinny because of ice cream. According to The Atlantic, study after study shows that ice cream has health benefits. But there are enough caveats that I recommend against you going out and filling your freezer.

The Atlantic article is very long and quite entertaining, but it really revolves around just two points: (1) Study after study appears to show that people who regularly eat ice cream have a lower risk of Type II diabetes, and (2) scientists simply don’t believe this can be true and always look for ways to obscure or downplay this bit of data. I’ll summarize it as best I can, although with the caveats:

A 2018 Harvard study by a doctoral student revealed that “Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems.” The problem with this result wasn’t just that it ran counter to all modern theories about healthy eating; it was also that it replicated something prior researchers had found and resisted, to the point of burying it in footnotes and refusing to speak to the media.

Image: Ice cream (cropped) by Racool_studio.

The same result appeared in another Harvard study, this one from 2002, that examined more than 5,000 young adults for heart disease risk factors: “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.” What was buried in that subject was that 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.”

That same result cropped against in a 2005 huge longitudinal study looking at data following men between the years 1986 and 1998. This time, the authors claimed that the big reduction in the risk of Type II diabetes came from consuming low-fat or nonfat dairy products, not whole milk or cream products. The one exception, buried at the end of the article, was ice cream:

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.

The most important takeaway is that the paper says that researchers agree that dairy is good for us. There’s no surprise there. Most Westerners evolved on a high-dairy diet. Our bodies are meant to use it. Currently, most science is focused on yogurt, which has the advantage not only of being a dairy product associated with a reduced risk of diabetes but of having all sorts of interesting bacteria that are associated with a healthy gut biome—and that gut biome is now being viewed as the possible basis for all good health. But still, there’s that yogurt factor.

Regarding the wonders of ice cream, the verdict is still out, and that may be because of the inherent difficulty in understanding the nuances of people’s self-reported eating habits. For example, says the article, people who already had health problems may have stopped eating ice cream, while people with no health problems continued to eat it. “In that scenario, it wouldn’t be that ice cream prevented diabetes, but that being at risk of developing diabetes caused people not to eat ice cream. Epidemiologists call that ‘reverse causation.’” However, even one study that tried to adjust for that fact still showed some benefits from ice cream.

The essay concedes that ice cream doesn’t have to be that bad:

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,” [Dariush] Mozaffarian said.

Ice cream also still has the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” which may be “more metabolically neutral” than other dairy products, such as butter.

Ultimately, my grandmother’s doctor, 100 years ago, probably gave her the best advice of all: Eat everything you like, he told her in a time when food was not preprocessed and awash in additives, but do it in moderation.

As for me, I’m already planning to whip up a batch of my all-natural chocolate ice cream, along with a promise I hope to keep, which is to eat only one cup per week.