Is ice cream for breakfast too good to be true?
It’s either what dreams are made of or really, really bad science
In the annals of “things I want to be true”, ice cream being a healthy breakfast food comes at number 3, lagging behind Firefly being renewed for another season (it could happen, dammit) and having the power to move things with my mind like Jean Grey from X-Men.
Yes, I’m a nerd.
So I was surprised and a little delighted to read the headline “ Eating Ice Cream For Breakfast Makes You Smarter, Scientist Claims”. It seems like a dream come true; finally I could have a frozen delight to start my day.
If ice cream can be good for me, maybe Firefly is coming back!
But.
It’s always good to be a bit wary when it comes to claims like this. At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything about ice cream that would cause it to make you smarter. So I did a little research.
Not so sweet?
The first alarm bells rang when I couldn’t find the study. Now, it was conducted in Japan, but as far as I could tell has never been published. This is a problem because the researchers didn’t even go through the basic hurdle of having a bunch of academics make fun of your formatting in the peer-review process.
It’s also bad because unpublished research is more likely to be biased (or wrong). There are a number of reasons for this, but basically without having a glance at how the researchers did the study, we don’t really know how they got their results. Maybe they did good. Maybe they cheated. Maybe they fabricated data. We just don’t know.
The second alarm bell rang when I found out that the scientist in charge of the research has had quite a number of papers retracted due to “irregularities in documentation”. Journals are notoriously reluctant to retract studies even with damning evidence of outright fraud, so it’s a big red flag when a researcher has (that I can find) 4 papers retracted due to irregularities and possible malfeasance.
Now I was really suspicious. Looking at the news reports, it seemed like a very poorly-done study; there was no adequate control, no reported mean difference, nothing about how many people were in the study. My dream was starting to lose its rosy edges.
So I doubled-down, opened Google Translate, and started looking in English and Japanese for the study itself.
It took me a while but I did finally track down the study.
Sorry, the press release.
Sorry, the news article on a pop-news site.
The article that was sponsored by a popular Japanese ice cream manufacturer.
Yes, the ‘study’ that news sources from around the globe have been citing was not, in fact, a study at all. Technically the ‘research’ (I use that term loosely) was, as far as I can tell, a piece of click-bait produced to sell ice cream.
Lazy reporting and marketing ‘science’
I’ve previously written about bad science reporting. It’s no surprise that, when faced with a densely-written scientific study, a journalist would go to the press release (or another news source) and assume that their conclusions have been reported correctly.
Most journalists just don’t have the time to thoroughly investigate the results reported in a scientific study, and honestly we as consumers would rather read inflated (but misleading) claims than the truth anyway.
But if there’s a point at which you can reasonably say “this was lazy reporting”, then ice cream for breakfast is definitely it.
Not one news site reported this as anything other than groundbreaking science. As far as I can tell, the quotes they used were roughly translated from the original click-bait article.
Even the best reporting only gave the “other side” in the form of advice from expert dietitians, but honestly there was no reason for it in the first place. This study was so obviously crap that most science websites haven’t even bothered debunking it.
We all love a good story, and we all want ice cream for breakfast to make us smarter. And because of lazy reporting there are people who believe that it will.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Where’s the harm? It’s a fun story and a little bit of ice cream never hurt anybody”.
But people believe scientists when they say things, no matter how absurd. Obesity and diabetes are at epidemic proportions. I can say from personal experience just how easy it is to trick yourself into thinking you are eating something healthy; you only need the flimsiest of excuses to gorge.
People are going to read this ‘news’ and think “I’m going to try ice cream for breakfast. The science says it’ll help, right?”
And some of them are probably going to get sick. Some of them might die.
I would love ice cream to be a good breakfast food. If I were a bit more lazy, a bit more ignorant of scientific research, hell if I had a bit less time whilst waiting for the next season of Stranger Things I might still think that it was. Reporters, editors, news sources in general have a responsibility to make sure that at the very least their article isn’t complete bullshit. It’s time to hold them to that responsibility.
Because if we won’t, no one will.
