Eat Ice Cream. Live Longer.

In a recent radio interview, David Johns told me that a 2005 Harvard study discovered that if diabetics consumed a half cup of ice cream per day their risk of heart problems would decrease. The press was told that yogurt (which also had a positive health effect) was the key finding, not ice cream, since the scientists felt yogurt would be easier for the American public to accept. (Researchers have not been able to disprove the “ice cream” finding.)

Red wine is good for you, right? If you check out the Mayo Clinic website, it says that the antioxidants in red wine are good for the heart yet, just recently, the “fun-loving” WHF (World Heart Federation) has declared that no amount of alcohol is good for you.

What about fat versus sugar? The medical community has obsessed over dietary fat for decades and pretty much ignored sugar intake which may be an even more important dietary problem. But their worst piece of advice, in my opinion, is the cholesterol scare. The Framingham Heart Study, which is the basis for most cholesterol claims, concluded that cholesterol level has very little to do with heart disease. The statistics showed that if your risk of heart disease is one incident out of a thousand human years (a common statistical measurement) then someone with high cholesterol would increase his/her risk to 1.2 human years. And here is the kicker, if you are over 70, data suggests that high cholesterol actually decreases the likelihood of heart disease. Today over 800 million prescriptions are written for statins covering 100 million Americans. (There is evidence that statins can have positive health benefits but serum cholesterol levels are poorly understood in terms of their health effects.)

The problem with many of these studies is that they rely on interviews with the participants and we all know that people are rarely truthful about their daily habits. If your doctor asks you how many drinks you have per week, one is likely to say something like, “I only drink on weekends” whereas weekday cocktail hour is hallowed routine in your household. It’s human nature. The other problem is that behavior (eating ice cream) may not be causal. For example, perhaps people who admit to eating ice cream weekly are more honest with themselves about their health and therefore pursue a healthier lifestyle. The same might be true about smokers – perhaps they take up smoking since they are under stress and it’s the inability to manage stress that accounts, in part, for poor health outcomes.

Now, I am not throwing out the baby with the bath water. The medical community performs miracles daily and nobody in their right mind would want to have lived in the 19th century when it comes to almost any ailment from a rotten tooth to a broken leg to chronic pain to cancer. It wasn’t all that long ago that surgeons did not understand infection and performed operations without sterilized equipment or thoroughly disinfected hands. James Garfield was shot near Union Station in Washington, D.C. and probably died of an infection caused by the surgeon who probed the wound with unwashed fingers.

Perhaps we rely too much on the opinion of experts? A native of Paris is not going to change his or her consumption of red wine based on whatever the World Heart Federation says nor is any good Roman going to cut down on pasta consumption due to a scare over carbohydrates. Speaking of carbohydrates, the theory is that they are uniquely fattening because they drive insulin spikes which, in turn, are instrumental in shuttling blood glucose into fat stores. The problem is that human metabolism is complex and this process is not well understood. And how did our human ancestors, many of whom consumed few carbohydrates, manage to gain weight?

So, where does that leave us? My personal guidelines around food are similar to the principles promoted by Michael Pollan. Eat real food. Eat home-cooked food. Eat and drink in moderation. Eat in good company. (Many French folks I know refuse to eat meals alone – dining is as much about the company as it is about the food.)

As for the medical studies, the food pyramid, and the often-silly pronouncements of Congress, I return to moderation and common sense as guiding principles. But, as Mark Twain once said, “I never smoke to excess – that is, I smoke in moderation, one cigar at a time!”