A lot of people do. From www.howstuffworks.com/question96.htm, "Most people have experienced the dreaded ice cream headache at some point. You are minding your own business on a hot summer day and you are eating something like an ice cream cone, a milk shake, a slurpee or a sno-cone. Then suddenly, out of the blue you are hit with the most excrutiating headache in the world! Fortunately they only last about 30 seconds.
"So where do these horrible headaches come from??? I have not seen a better answer to the question than this excellent article by Joseph Hulihan, Temple University. Here's a summary: When something cold touches the roof of your mouth on a hot day, it triggers a cold headache. The cause is a dilation of blood vessels in the head. The dilation may be caused by a nerve center located above the roof of your mouth - when this nerve center gets cold, it seems to over-react and tries to heat your brain. Therefore, the easy way to avoid brain freeze would be to keep cold things away from the roof of your mouth!"
Further to the research on ice cream headache comes the work of a young school student from Canada.
Half of the children were instructed to eat 100 millilitres of vanilla ice cream in less than five seconds. The other half were told to eat the same amount - the equivalent of about two scoops - so that some was still left in the bowl after 30 seconds. The kids were then told to report whether they developed a headache. The findings suggest that mom is right when she says you should eat ice cream slowly: 27 per cent of students in the "accelerated eating group" reported ice-cream headache, compared with only 13 per cent in the "cautious eating group," the study says. Of the 29 headaches reported, 59 per cent lasted less than 10 seconds. Prof. Kaczorowski said the headache sensation is caused by the ice cream touching the roof of a person's mouth, and that when one eats ice cream quickly, this is more likely to happen than when eating slowly.
The British Medical Journal, published weekly, receives about 6,000 articles submitted for publication each year. For its annual Christmas edition, the journal solicits lighter or unusual material and Prof. Kaczorowski thought his daughter's study fit perfectly. "We submitted the paper at the end of August and we went through the sort of usual peer review and we had to address some of the questions, some of the issues, and then we were told, 'You are in,'" Prof. Kaczorowski said. Maya said she was "really happy" when the study was published and says she "could follow it up with a different type of ice cream, but I'm not sure if I'm going to do that or not." "I have a lot more school work this year," Maya said. She was in Grade 8 when the study was done but has since started high school at Westdale Secondary School in Hamilton. After high school, Maya is thinking of studying to become a university professor, either in sociology or architecture. Here she's following in the footsteps of her father, who has a doctorate degree in sociology.
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