The Scoop on
Ice-Cream Headaches

By Serena Gordon

If you’ve ever had an ice-cream headache, you’ve probably wondered what you could do to stop it from happening again.

Maya Kaczorowski wondered, too, but didn’t stop there. This Ontario native loves ice cream but really hates ice-cream headaches. Her parents said she just needed to eat her ice cream slowly. Maya didn’t like that idea, so she decided to do a little research.

Maya’s dad is a professional researcher. He helped her find medical information on the Internet. Not much had been written about ice-cream headaches. One article said that only 2 out of every 10 people have ever had an ice-cream headache. Maya thought that number was probably higher because a lot of people she knew had experienced ice-cream headaches.

An Idea for an Experiment
So, when she needed a project for her school science fair, she knew just what to do.

	Maya and her dad share some ice cream—eating slowly.

With help from her parents and some eager classmates, Maya, who was 12 at the time, set up an ice-cream-headache experiment.

During December 2001 and January 2002, Maya invited 145 kids from her school to eat two scoops of vanilla ice cream each. Maya asked half of the kids to eat their ice cream in less than 30 seconds. The other half had to eat their tasty treat slowly.

Maya learned that eating ice cream fast really can bring on an ice-cream headache. Twenty-seven percent of the kids in the fast-eating group got ice-cream headaches, but only 13 percent of the kids who ate slowly did. That means eating ice cream fast doubled their chance of getting an ice-cream headache.

But not everyone who ate the ice cream quickly got a headache. In fact, most didn’t. Out of 73 students in the fast-eating group, only 20 had an ice-cream headache.

But eating slowly wasn’t a headache-free guarantee. Nine of the 72 kids in the slow-eating group got headaches.

Maya also learned that most kids in her study have had ice-cream headaches. Almost 8 out of 10 children in her experiments said they had had at least one ice-cream headache in their lifetime. That’s way more than the 20 percent Maya read about.

Publishing a Report
Maya thought this information might be helpful for doctors to know. So she wrote about her experiment for a medical journal, a magazine that’s written for doctors.

It’s not easy to have an article published in a medical journal, even for an adult. Maya had to try a few times before her article was accepted.

Although most articles in medical journals are serious, Maya was able to include some humor in her article. For example, most research papers list where the money for their experiments came from. In Maya’s article, she wrote, “This work was supported by an unrestricted grant from Mum and Dad.”

On the Evening News
Maya received a lot of attention for her article because kids don’t usually write for medical journals. She talked to reporters from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. She even flew to New York City to be on a TV show.

Maya was surprised by all the attention. “It was about ice-cream headaches, not some serious illness!” Maya says, laughing.

Maya hopes to do more research in the future. She also plans to eat plenty of ice cream. But thanks to her experiment, she knows eating slowly will increase the chances of enjoying her ice cream headache-free!

Don’t Scream from Ice Cream
Nothing ruins a yummy ice-cream cone faster than an ice-cream headache.

Luckily, these headaches, sometimes called “brain freezes,” usually last less than a minute.

Scientists don’t know exactly what causes them, but they think it’s a misunderstanding between your mouth and your brain.

When you eat, food touches nerves in your mouth that sense hot and cold. Nerves take messages from one part of the body to another. When you eat cold food, the nerves in the middle of the roof of your mouth tell the brain that the mouth is getting cold.

That makes the blood vessels that lead to the brain get bigger. Blood vessels are like hoses that carry blood through the body. More blood can flow through them when they get bigger, which helps warm the brain.

Scientists think the fast swelling of blood vessels is what causes the pounding pain of an ice-cream headache.

That’s probably why kids who quickly slurp their ice cream have more brain freezes than kids who take their time.

Ice cream isn’t the only food that can cause these headaches. Any really cold food can do it. So watch out for snow cones, slushy fruit drinks, ice, and even cold water. To reduce your chances of having a headache that makes you scream when you eat ice cream, remember: eat slowly and keep cold foods from touching the middle part of the roof of your mouth.