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Comment by ratg13 | Hacker News Reader

Too lazy to create an archive link from my phone but this quote has me interested to read the rest.

>Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems

Your mood has a strong effect on your health - stress is a huge source of deaths in the US (probably the largest by far but I have no studies to link). If a half a cup of ice cream significantly improves your mood and takes you out of depression then yea - it's probably pretty good. Please also be aware that if we're discussing the American diet there are plenty of folks who drink coke like water - ice cream has a pretty equal amount of sugar by volume of coke and the lack of excessive amounts of sodium means that there's less of a drive to over consume it.

Sweets eaten in reasonable quantities can be part of a healthy diet to maintain weight - though generally for weight loss you'll want to cut out as much sugar as you can or find better sources for it since our bodies are terrible at processing it.

1. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/au/brands/coca-cola 10.6g per 1/2 cup (ish) vs. https://smartlabel.unileverusa.com/077567274731-0001-en-US/i... - 19g per 2/3s of a cup

I'm pretty sure there's more than mood going on here. Why is there not a "soda effect"?

I would appreciate an archive link though

https://archive.is/SYiLH

The key questions are: what is the study size, and what is the effect size?

Wouldn't just drinking milk be healthier?

Why? The whole point of the article is that people are making assumptions based off of common wisdom and we only trust the data when it seems to confirm our assumptions.

Also, ice cream is pretty different than milk.

The issue is ice cream is a mixture of ingredients. It has cream, sugar, milk, and sometimes eggs. Seeing if there's an effect with just one of the ingredients would offer greater specificity.

Compared to what? Eating a pint?

Perhaps that may be the confounding variable. Anyone capable of eating only a half cup of ice cream has 99th percentile willpower which likely translates to other healthy habits.

> Anyone capable of eating only a half cup of ice cream has 99th percentile willpower which likely translates to other healthy habits.

They're diabetics. You might be surprised how many people are able to comply with the directive "don't overdo this, or you'll die a horrible death".

Though you shouldn't be.

Who is telling type 2 diabetics that they are going to die a horrible death from eating ice cream?

That's not how this works

Compared to none. But the article doesn't really say that it is actually good for diabetes. It's an association.

The article didn't link to the paper (or if it did, I wasn't able to find it). If you're basing this claim on the original paper, can you share a link?

Here is the relevant table. It seems that it's not compared to none, but rather compared to less than one serving per month. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

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