By ANDREW MCGOWAN May 3, 2016

After months of work, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have made the groundbreaking discovery that people who regularly eat ice cream almost always live longer than people with terminal illnesses.

“This is a major breakthrough for the scientific community. No one could have predicted these results,” said Josh Campbell, a member of the MIT research team.

To conduct the study, researchers visited Boston’s largest hospitals and interviewed an array of terminally ill patients. Many interviewees suspected they would die soon, likely due to their terminal illnesses.

The research done at Boston’s ice cream parlors produced different results. “It seemed like almost no one was going to die soon,” said Mr. Campbell.

Researchers also noted that in the hospitals many patients were severely underweight, some were even coughing up blood. At the ice cream parlors however, nobody coughed up any blood and a large number of the customers appeared overweight.

The researchers believe that this correlation might be related to ice cream toppings as many of the ice cream eaters had sprinkles, cherries or hot fudge on their cones, while sick were not able to eat ice cream, and thus did not consume any toppings. To study the effect of toppings on the terminally ill, researchers attempted to administer hot fudge and sprinkles into a patient’s IV tube, but the patient died in the process from, according to the researchers, unrelated causes.

The MIT scientists would like to conduct a long-term study, but the fatally ill patients keep dying before significant data can be collected.