If you’re having ice cream headaches often, it might be worth seeing if it runs in your family and taking a second look at your non-brain-freeze headaches too.
It’s a sweltering summer day and you’re tucking into your favourite frozen treat when suddenly it feels like you’ve taken an icepick to the forehead. A sharp, stabbing pain appears to come from deep within your brain. All you can do is sit there, feeling foolish as your ice cream drips, until the pain wears off.
“Ice cream headache is very, very common,” says Amaal Starling, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in the US, who prefers chocolate ice cream. “It’s harmless, it comes and it goes.”
So why are we punished this way for eating cold things too quickly? It turns out that, in addition to afflicting generations of unassuming dessert lovers, brain freeze has a decades-long history of aiding scientific progress – and it can tell you a lot more about your health than you think.
What is brain freeze?
What most of us learn as children to call a brain freeze or ice cream headache is referred to by scientists as a cold-stimulus headache, Starling says.
