Nehaveigur

In the 1999 movie Ghost Dog, there’s a scene where an ice cream vendor hears that ice cream isn’t all that bad after all and can’t wait to pass the news on to his customers. “They say ice cream is really good for your health. Rich in calcium!”, he announces over the loudspeaker mounted on his ice cream truck. Anyway, you should watch the whole movie because it’s magnificent for reasons that aren’t related to dietary advice.

More recently, the same thing happened for real. Even though ice cream is made of fat and sugar, which conventional wisdom strongly suggest should be avoided, there is robust epidemiological evidence that its consumption is associated with a lower risk of heart disease. It’s not a small effect either: Those who ate ice cream no more than twice a week were 12 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. While this is based on an observational study, so that there’s a chance that it’s not going to hold up, it definitely makes it harder to argue that ice cream is bad.

Recently, I mentioned this observation to two colleagues while we were debating whether to get ice cream for lunch. After some back and forth, we decided to go for it. It made us feel like devil-may-care rebels. I had a cookies and cream milk shake and it was the best lunch I’ve had in some time. Afterwards, I remembered having previously read that one hundred years ago, long before the current obesity epidemic, having ice cream for lunch was considered normal:

From relatively austere malted milks to the most elaborate sundaes, all of these sweet confections were considered perfectly acceptable as a main course for lunch, particularly by women. In fact, American sugar consumption spiked during the 1920s. This was in part thanks to Prohibition—deprived of alcohol, Americans turned to anything sweet for a quick, satisfying rush.

Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe: A Square Meal, quoted by Slime Mold Time Mold