NEWS: Excellent News about Ice Cream

CULTURE: Excellent News about Ice Cream

For once in our lives, some good news about what women can/should eat: the Harvard School of Public Health says that women who eat ice cream every day are healthier, at least where fertility's concerned.

So throw that goddamn "What to Expect When You're Expecting" book away (for the uninitiated, it lectures women to eat crap like wheat germ and avoid candy, suggests that they enlist their husbands to "help" them by reminding them what to eat and what not to eat, and says lovely things like "with every forkful of food, ask yourself: is what I'm eating the best thing for my baby? If not, put the fork down") and eat some goddamn ice cream.

Bitch_PhD's favorite Ben & Jerry's flavor is "Chubby Hubby."

Hmmm...Yay ice cream then

i love mint ice cream , thats all i got

Of course, in about 2 weeks we'll be reading another article that states that eating ice cream has been linked to certain kinds of breast cancer

Hmm, the benefit of eating dairy has been linked to far more than just women trying to conceive.

wait...so you're trying to say that because I eat a lot of yogurt (ie lowfat dairy product) I have an 85% chance of being infertile? That sounds like bullshit to me.

I like ice cream but I don't want to be fertile.

Conundrum

You have an 85% greater chance of being infertile.

"Women who ate more than two portions a day of low fat dairy foods were 85 per cent more likely to be infertile due to ovulatory disorders than those who only ate it less than once a week."

So if those who only ate it less than once a week were (for the sake of simplicity) 10% likely infertile, you'd be 18.5% likely.

I think it means that if 1% of women that eat tons of high-fat dairy products are infertile, then 1.85% of women who eat little high-fat dairy products would be infertile. I just made up the 1 and 1.85 numbers, but I think the idea is that the percentage represents a ratio.

The article mentions that 438 of the 116,000 women in the study experienced ovulatory disorders. If my understanding of the numbers is right, then around 154 of these women were consumers of high-fat dairy, while the remaining 284 were consumers of low-fat dairy products. 284 is 85% larger than 154.

Of course, I am guessing at the methodology at work, but that seems to be what the people involved in the study mean.

No, no. You're 85% more likely, if you eat it every day, to have fertility problems compared to women who eat lowfat dairy once a week. It's not an absolute number, it's a relative one. Likewise, the 25% less infertility problems for everyday full-fat eaters is compared to people who only eat full-fat dairy once a week.

And both of these are only about fertility problems based on ovulation disorders--sort of like the findings that women who are very thin or exercise an awful lot may skip ovulation and menstruation. It doesn't say anything about any other kind of fertility issues people might have.

yep.

except for the "i'm a fancy-pants vegan chef who makes her own ice cream" part

great, so i'll stick with the low fat then. </3 babies

Time to chub out on ice cream.... it's all for the babies....

Aw, this is crap. Every week there's a new thing that gives us cancer or whatever. I can't keep worrying about every new studie when they keep changing it. I'm just gonna eat whatever I want.

Except for liquorice, that stuff is poisonous.

I don't eat dairy ever because I don't like it. I hope it helps me not have teh chillins.

So, is this study supposed to control for body weight? I mean, we already knew that women who are pregnant or want to be pregnant should increase body fat, so I wonder exactly how much more than that this study tells us. After all, the woman eating yogurt every day is probably significantly thinner than the woman chowing down on ice cream - and therefore, already not primed for baby makin'.