Medical mysteri BRRRR! FEAR YOUR POPSICLE!

We Americans firmly believe in warning each other about possible danger. For years, we have been told of the terrible damage that smoking can do to our bodies. At restaurants and in grocery stores, we are bombarded with warnings that tell us if we don’t cook certain foods correctly, nasty things might happen to our innards. My bottle of scotch has a warning on it that says, more or less, “If you drink too much of this, you better not even think about driving a motor vehicle, and you are going to feel real crappy tomorrow.”

Any day now, I expect to get ready to take a chomp out of my Klondike bar or orange Popsicle and look down and see something that says, “If you eat this product too rapidly, you are likely to experience an icky, piercing sensation inside your head that is commonly known as a ‘brain freeze.’”

Most of us have experienced a brain freeze, which is also known as an icecream headache, cold-stimulus headache, or in more technical terms, sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. Simply said, it is “a kind of short-term headache typically linked to the rapid consumption of ice-cream, ice pops, or very cold drinks,” according to Medical News Today.

At one time, a brain freeze was attributed to abrupt temperature changes in the sinuses. Researchers at Harvard Medical School debunked that theory by looking at cerebral blood flow among people who quickly consumed cold food or drinks. The result of the study, according to Toronto’s The Globe and Mail, was that “ice-cream headaches are caused by rapid dilation of a cerebral artery, which floods the brain with blood.”

When something cold touches the roof of your mouth, there is an increased flow of blood to the area to warm it up.

In the Harvard study, Dr. Jorge Serrador and his team found that the sensation of a brain freeze seems to be caused by a dramatic and sudden increase in blood flow through the brain’s anterior cerebral artery. The best way to avoid brain freeze is a common-sense one — don’t eat so fast.

Dr. Serrador and his team think that local changes in blood flow could be the cause of other types of headaches, including migraines. Further studies might identify medications that could help migraines and other serious headaches by preventing or reversing widening of blood vessels.

And I will be glad to help the good folks from Harvard in any further studies if they’ll buy the Klondike bars and orange Popsicles.