Eager to learn more, I reached out to Ardisson Korat for an interview-I emailed him four times-but never heard back. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect. Something else grabbed my attention, though: The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. “There are few plausible biological explanations for these results,” Ardisson Korat wrote in the brief discussion of his “unexpected” finding in his thesis. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. (Harvard’s Nutrition Source website calls ice cream an “indulgent” dairy food that is considered an “every-so-often” treat.) As a public-health historian, I’ve studied how teams of researchers process data, mingle them with theory, and then package the results as “what the science says.” I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before. Still, the abject silliness of “healthy ice cream” intrigued me. Spurious effects pop up all the time in science, especially in fields like nutritional epidemiology, where the health concerns and dietary habits of hundreds of thousands of people are tracked over years and years. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.”
“He and his committee had done, like, every type of analysis-they had thrown every possible test at this finding to try to make it go away. This was obviously not what a budding nutrition expert or his super-credentialed committee members were hoping to discover.
“I do sort of remember the vibe being like, Hahaha, this ice-cream thing won’t go away that’s pretty funny,” recalled my tipster, who’d attended the presentation. View MoreĮarlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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