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What’s Good & Bad About Ice Cream?
By Tracy Morris and Luna Marcus
What is it with women and ice cream?
Ah. It’s a question hardly worth analyzing. Who cares why we love it so much?! Next to chocolate (or, for some of us, solidly leading the race,) ice cream in all its delectable flavors is one of the universe’s gifts to humans.
There’s got to be something bad about it.
So we tossed that question to the makers of a new kind of ice cream, Coconut Bliss. Naturally, they’re a tad biased — and they make their case well. We’re happy to hear they’re on the horizon.
To keep things on the up and up, though, we also yielded the floor to a Registered Dietitian, to get a view from that more persnickety, I mean, scientific angle.
Margaret Goode, MA, RD, LD is the owner of The Goode Life, which she started after years of working with patients in hospitals and long-term care facilities. Her website lists her fascinating myriad services to promote healthy nutrition and lifestyles at home. Besides the usual diet consultation and planning, Margaret also works with individuals and companies to analyze recipes, coordinate meal plans, and lead grocery store tours.
We’ve taken the liberty of weaving Margaret’s comments into the article by
Luna Marcus, who bought a two-dollar hand-cranked ice cream maker from Goodwill and made her first batch of coconut milk ice cream in 2005. With her recipe and her partner, Larry, she created
Luna & Larry’s Coconut Bliss, ice cream made from organic coconut milk and without dairy, soy or sugar.
Go for the Cold
By Luna Marcus
Ice cream: some scream for it, and some of us run screaming from it. No other food recalls childhood, long summer vacations, and the just reward for cleaning one’s plate quite like ice cream.
As adults, we worry about the health and ecological impacts of dairy. We worry about soy. We worry about sugar. We worry about highly processed foods. We worry about fats, calories, points, carbs, glycemic indexes, GMOs and the carbon footprint of our diet.
Is it possible to simply enjoy ice cream again?
Moo medicine
Dairy is by nature’s design a “comfort food.” Mother’s milk, whether from a human mother or bovine mother, contains the protein casein, which breaks down into opiates in your digestive tract. This unique effect of milk drives the survival instinct, since it encourages infants to keep eating, growing, and gaining weight. Opiates in milk also create a relaxed state and help the bonding process because babies learn to associate “mommy” and “eating” with pleasure. No wonder we’re so hooked on dairy! It’s a drug, but at least it’s a natural high. Ice cream just makes us feel good, and there’s nothing bad about feeling good.
Margaret Goode: “Opiates? To say ‘hormone-like substances‘ is more accurate. The digestion of dairy and mother’s milk can produce hormone-like substances that can affect mood and give a state of comfort to the brain.”
But dairy is a common allergen. It’s one of the ‘big eight’ food allergies that account for 90 percent of all food allergies, along with eggs, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, seafood, shellfish and soy. Dairy allergies often manifest as headaches, acne and skin irritation, congestion, immune disorders or digestive problems. Lactose, a milk sugar, is responsible for minor symptoms such as nausea, bloating, cramping, gas and diarrhea. 30 to 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant, including 75 percent of African Americans and 90 percent of Asian Americans. Current research links dairy to cancer, diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, heart disease and fertility problems.
Margaret Goode: “Dairy is indeed a food that many people are allergic or sensitive to, and those numbers are probably true. It‘s a bit more of a stretch to say it‘s directly linked with diabetes, cancer, and fertility. Obesity, sure.”
The white stuff is hardly green. Dairy farming takes an environmental toll, including water pollution, soil pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manure and other waste, but also because of the volumes of water and food crops needed to raise livestock. A lactating cow drinks 25-50 gallons of fresh water and needs 90 pounds of food daily, resources that could be put to use feeding hungry people. And as recent investigations have uncovered, there is reason to be alarmed by the health and welfare of animals raised to provide food.
Margaret Goode: “That dairy isn’t environmentally green: I’d say that’s true.”
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