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Eat your ice cream for a long, healthy life? This doctor says so
July 13, 20265:00 AM ET, Heard on Morning Edition
By Allison Aubrey, 3-Minute Listen
Oncologist and bioethicist Zeke Emanuel takes a back-to-basics approach to maintain good health in his new book, including tips like allowing yourself to enjoy ice cream.
If you’re hankering for a cool treat on a hot day, nothing screams summer like ice cream.
And a physician renowned for shaping U.S. healthcare policy has a message: Go ahead and enjoy it.
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Zeke Emanuel is an oncologist and bioethicist who served as an adviser to the Obama administration, helping shape the Affordable Care Act. He believes in a system that invests in prevention, one that aims to keep people healthy. So when he released his book, literally titled Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life, I asked him what motivated him.
“Mostly anger at the wellness industrial complex,” Emanuel says. He says the wellness industry is selling people all kinds of things that are expensive and clinically unproven, pointing to the latest peptide trend, whole body scans and “all sorts of supplements” marketed as anti-aging elixirs.
In his book, Emanuel takes a back-to-basics approach, based on evidence, to maintaining good health.
And though the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, he points to evidence that people who are in the habit of eating ice cream have a lower risk of metabolic disease, despite the fact that it has lots of sugar and fat. Researchers have dubbed this the “ice cream paradox.” There’s data from 2015 that suggests “that ice cream is actually pretty good at preventing development of Type 2 diabetes, and dairy in general is good at preventing Type 2 diabetes,” Emanuel says.
Dairy contains whey protein that may benefit glucose regulation, which may partially explain the association, though the research doesn’t nail down cause and effect. Emanuel is also big on consuming more fiber and fermented foods, pointing to the need to feed the bacteria in our guts.
“Evolution would have gotten rid of them if they weren’t there for a reason,” Emanuel says. “And so treating them well, through eating more fermented foods, whether it’s yogurt or cottage cheese or hard cheeses like gruyere or kimchi or sauerkraut, good things for us.”
Prioritize sleep and stay active
Emanuel’s other recommendations for increasing your chances of a long, healthy life track with a huge body of evidence on the importance of daily habits, including exercise, social connections and sufficient sleep. A new study published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that people who skimp on sleep for just six weeks start to gain weight, in part because lack of sleep throws off hunger hormones.
“We know that biologically, sleep is important. We know that it’s important to clear out the brain’s — to basically empty the garbage, as it were. We know it’s important to consolidate long-term memories. We know it’s important for DNA to repair. So there’s a lot of very important elements,” Emanuel says.
Bottom line: Sleep, he says, should not be shortchanged.
Continue/Read Original Article: This doctor says eat your ice cream for a long, healthy life : NPR
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