Almost everybody knows ice cream are bad to us, but I love them as much as you do. Should we just say goodbye to them? The common reasons why ice cream is evil includes they are rich in sweet and fat. Yet I was frightened by another reason that I’ve never heard before– ice cream have tons of bacteria!

The first bacteriological ice cream examinations in Cincinnati were made in 1911, and the result is surprising– a minimum of 200,000 bacteria per cc. and a maximum of 400,000,000 bacteria per cc. The analyzed causes include high bacteria counts in the original cream and milk, unsanitary factories, and careless handling. After improvement of sanitary environment, thirty- nine samples of ice cream are tested in the first week of March, 1914. The bacteria counts are here. So it is proved that when sanitary condition gets better, the number of bacteria falls down to some extent.

Then I am curious about which composed part of ice cream mainly contributes bacteria, and I’m happy to find the article demonstrating 5 studies, basically  separating the ingredients apart from the ice cream to see how much bacteria each ingredient has. The result is that “Sugar and eggs have practically no effect upon the bacterial content of ice cream. Vanilla powder and gelatin as ordinarily used introduce comparatively few bacteria, the great majority being derived from the cream.”

Though the resource is from PubMed, a rather primary academic literature, I think the study is not that perfect. One of the reason is that it is not controlled well, since the two tests were conducted in different seasons, which lead to different temperatures. Thus, the satisfactory result in the second test may partly due to the cold weather on the test day. Since we know as temperature goes up, bacteria has better environment to grow in. I think this is also why refrigerator can help us keep foods from going bad for a longer period of time.

So based on what we know now, it seems ice cream have so many downsides to our health and we’d better kiss good bye to this wonderful sweet dessert. Is this really the case? I continue searching and this article gives us some positive sides. “Ice cream is a dairy product with good potential to act as a food carrier for probiotic bacteria. Since in addition to making a functional healthy food, ice cream in itself contains beneficial substances such as dairy raw materials, vitamins and minerals, and is consumed by the general population. Also, compared with fermented milks as a vehicle, ice cream supports considerably greater viability of probiotic strains during production and especially storage.” Since this should be the first and only article I’ve ever seen that gives compliment to ice cream, I checked its credibility.

  (My screen cast)

It is actually from Google Scholar, so it can be taken into consideration. This article with new perspectives is further backed up by other articles I found. One article explains that “Probiotic ice cream was made by fermenting a standard ice cream mix with Lactobacillus acidophilus and Bifidobacterium bifidum cultures and then freezing the mix in a batch freezer,” and that probiotic ice cream is a suitable vehicle for delivering beneficial microorganisms such as L. acidophilus and B. bifidum to consumers.

Now I’m excited to find that ice cream are not always evil, they can actually bring benefits to us if produced properly. However, I noticed that the probiotic ice cream is a new type of invented ice cream intended to help people become healthier, so further studies should be done to test whether this kind of ice cream really do more good than bad to human. We can test the fat they bring to people and the beneficial microorganisms delivered to weigh the pro and cons, so we can decide the net benefit they carry to consumers before actually launching them into the market.

As we talked about in class, “your intuition is lousy”. Though most of us view ice cream as unhealthy food and cannot find another benefit from them except making us happy, science can make them beneficial microorganisms delivers to us with brilliant methodology. Science is amazing!