Ice cream correlations
An absurd (but interesting) example of the hunt for meaningful correlations
I am two months into a rough patch with my health — above average nastiness for eight weeks and counting. It’s getting so long that I’m not sure I can call it a "patch" anymore. It’s a bit different from my usual bullshit: lots of diffuse widespread soreness. I’ve always had some of this, but this is quite a bit worse than ever before.
Whenever I have a rough patch, my brain starts looking for correlations. (It has never found anything, but it always looks.) Has anything in my life changed? Is my environment different? Have I been doing anything differently?
Well… maybe…
I’ve been eating an awful lot of ice cream. Like really a lot. For me.
Milk seems like a weird villain, but okay
Many kinds of foods are faddish scapegoats for health problems, and milk is on that list. But I lack any classic symptoms of lactose intolerance, have few GI symptoms — blessing counted — and I have never consumed much of the stuff anyway.
So milk has not really been on my radar.
But I am aware that some people believe milk’s malfeasance is not limited to lactose intolerance. I don’t know much about it, but I know it’s a thing.
And I have this significant new milky habit. I re-discovered the joys of cheap ice cream a while back, and I’ve been an ice cream monster ever since.
For about, oh, eight weeks. Hmmmm.
The power of shitty ice cream compels you
I was eating Hoggin’ Daws almost daily, but only in small quantities, because that Hawkin Das stuff is super caloric, and I am quite a diligent calorie counter. I have often been horrified by just how little Haugen Dots I can afford to eat.
And then one day, frustration with that, I bought me some cheap “normal” ice cream for the first time in ages, and it was a revelation.
1. It wasn't terrible.
2. It has way less calories than Häägün Däüz.
70% of the quality for about 40% of the calories. What’s not to love? I kind of went nuts, and started eating ice cream almost every single day. Not huge amounts, but obsessively regular, almost daily.
When did my rough patch start? June 15.
When did I start eating ice cream almost daily? June 15.
(I would have absolutely no way of knowing this fascinating, ominous fact without my detailed logging. Nor would I have any way of testing it without logging. So that’s why I’m logging all the things.)
No, obviously I do NOT take this very seriously
I am partly sharing this because it’s fun and absurd… and yet …
Rational or not, these are the trains of thoughts you ride when you have unexplained illness. Any idea that involves a modifiable risk factor is of particular interest, even if it is somewhat implausible and silly. Sure, it’s unlikely that ice cream is my enemy, but what if it was?
Hope is even more tempting than ice cream.
The June 15 correlation is probably a coincidence, and there are other things that might explain this. For instance, I also have some suspicion that heat tends to exacerbate my symptoms, and guess when I started the ice cream habit? When it started getting warmer. Clearly that is no coincidence.
And what a great example of a confounding factor.
But eating ice cream is a modifiable risk factor, while the weather is not. So this is what I’m going to do…
Eat MOAR ice cream!
Two steps:
I’m going to double-down on ice cream and other milk products for the next week, clear out my supplies — a provocation test.
And then abruptly cut it all off — an elimination test.
If I get worse before the cut-off, and then better after, that's a signal. Which wouldn't prove anything, but it would justify some more experimenting (and relatively easy experimenting, too).
Am I doing this because there's a respectable chance of learning something important? Obviously not. I am mostly doing it for the ice cream. I love this plan. I cannot lose!
As an infant, you had several ear infections. They were painful and you cried a lot. Doctors gave you antibiotics and figured it would clear up in a few days. It usually did. But three times you had a broken eardrum (twice on one ear; once on the other). When you were about five, a doctor suggested to me that those ear infections could have been caused by a cow's milk allergy. We never explored that further, and I believe you drank lots of milk and ate lots of ice cream as a kid. Still....you never know. We considered so many things, didn't we?
Man, I never stop chasing the ghosts of food triggers. Very little has ever made much of a difference, though I'm always drawn to foods as somehow culpable... And then I cut things, and then I cut more things, and then more... and then I'm eating nothing but grassfed meat, cooked vegetables, and little else. I think I feel modestly better when I keep my sugar low, but beyond that, I can't say anything has helped enough to be clearly identifiable.