Instead, eating ice has been described more as an uncontrollable craving than a jolt of energy. Having an iron deficiency can progress to anaemia, but the two terms aren’t synonymous.īoth haematologists had never heard any of their patients say that ice makes them feel more alert. It’s better than sex.’”Bromberg remarked on some issues with the study’s details, such as omitting haemoglobin data for the anaemic patients and equating iron deficiency with anemia. You have to tease it out,” said Michael Bromberg, a Temple University haematologist. “Patients tend to be somewhat secretive about these kinds of behaviours. Although patients will admit to having pica if asked, typically they don’t volunteer the information readily. “As we replace a patient’s iron, the desire to chew ice will lessen, so it’s an easy symptom to follow in patients,” said Broome, who found the study fascinating and the conclusion quite feasible. She even uses the intensity of the disorder to help track whether treatment is working. For those with enough iron, Hunt speculates, there would be no additional benefit to more blood flow.Ĭatherine Broome, a haematologist with the Georgetown University School of Medicine, said she often sees pagophagia in her iron-deficient patients. So perhaps the chill of chewing on ice cubes may lead to an increase of oxygenated blood to the brain, providing the cognitive boost that anemic patients need. “It is sort of vestigial, but humans do show the dive reflex.”Ĭrucially, the reflex is triggered by the face having contact with cold water, but not warm water. “If you think about whales and dolphins diving, the water gets colder and their peripheral blood vessels constrict and shunt all the blood to the internal organs and the brain,” she said. This decreases the oxygen supply to the body’s periphery, saving it for vital organs. When submerged in water, most air-breathing vertebrates slow down their heart rate and constrict blood vessels in their arms and legs. Hunt points to a phenomenon called the mammalian diving reflex as a possible reason the ice-chewing caused better test performance. “That might explain things like dirt consumption, but it absolutely does not explain pagophagia.” “A general hypothesis of pica is that oftentimes, it is an attempt to supplement the diet with basic minerals – think iron or copper,” Hunt said. Certainly its association with low iron is real, although oddly, pica appears in only about half of iron-deficient patients. A Byzantine obstetric textbook from the sixth century AD describes patients craving spicy or salty dishes, but also dirt, eggshells and ashes.īut pica largely remains a medical mystery. The first might have been the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos, who in the fifth century BC wrote about pregnant women’s “desire to eat earth or charcoal”. About 20% of cases are pregnant women, since their iron stores can easily get depleted by their growing foetuses.įor centuries, doctors have taken note of pica in many forms. Patients with pica may also ingest atypical foods compulsively, such as lemons, tofu or dried pasta. Pagophagia is one of many types of pica, a disorder that encompasses daily craving and eating of unusual nonfoods such as clay, chalk, paste, cigarette butts or laundry starch. The study was published in the October issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses. It’s more like needing a cup of coffee or that cigarette,” Hunt said. For healthy subjects, having a cup of ice instead of water appeared to make no difference in test performance. But those who ate ice beforehand did just as well as their healthy counterparts. Iron-deficient subjects who had sipped on water performed far more slugglishly on the test than controls, as expected. Just before the test, participants were given either a cup of ice or lukewarm water to consume. Hunt and her colleagues had both anaemic and healthy subjects complete a standardised, 22-minute attention test commonly used to diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I don’t feel awake until I have a cup of ice in my hand.’” “I had a friend who was suffering from iron-deficiency anaemia who was just crunching through massive amounts of ice a day,” said study author Melissa Hunt, a clinical psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
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