Gobbling up ice cream too quickly really can cause an ice cream headache, researchers have found.

Ontario student Maya Kaczorowski, 13, set out to test if her mom's advice about eating ice cream slowly to prevent headaches held up under experimental conditions. She recruited 145 students from Dalewood Middle School in Hamilton to find out if eating smaller bites can prevent an ice cream headache.

All the students filled out a questionnaire recording their age, sex and headache history.

Lick, don't bite!
Lick, don't bite!

Half of the students were randomly selected and instructed to eat about two scoops of vanilla ice cream in less than five seconds. The others were told to leave some in the bowl after 30 seconds.

Kaczorowski found 27 per cent of the students in the "accelerated" eating group reported headaches, compared to 13 per cent among the "cautious" eaters.

Scientists have found that ice cream headaches, also called cold stimulus headaches, occur in about a third of a randomly selected population.

The experiment was conducted during the summer and repeated in the winter, but the incidence of headaches didn't appear to be affected by the weather.

Maya's father, Dr. Janusz Kaczorowski, an associate professor with the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, helped her to test the hypothesis.

Kaczorowski said people may develop an ice cream headache when cold foods touch the roof of their mouth and chills a blood vessel to the brain. Eating slowly seems to decrease the likelihood of this happening, he said.

The researchers acknowledge the study was flawed by the lack of blinding and use of self reporting.

"Nevertheless, these findings confirm that cold stimulation of the palate induced by gobbling up ice cream more than doubles the likelihood of developing ice cream headache among middle school students," they wrote.

As for Maya, she said she is thinking of becoming a university professor in sociology and architecture, and possibly pursing a career in medical research.

She said if she continued her study on ice cream headaches, she would explore other flavours.

The study appears in the lighthearted Dec. 25 issue of the British Medical Journal.