Why does eating ice cream make you thirsty?

strange how that works..

It could be the sugar…I know sugar makes me super thirsty, maybe you’re the same way. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten as thirsty from ice cream as you were, but whenever I have a candy bar or more than a couple cookies/etc I have to drink like two big glasses of water right afterward.

I’m not sure, does it have salt in it? That makes you thirsty.

Oh, for sure. I have to have a glsas of water right along with it.

I’ve often found myself thirsty after eating ice cream and for some reason, a glass of milk has always seemed better than water, in my case, for quenching my thirst.

ice cream has salt and sugar. for those of you who drink a shake or malt with it, the sugar is elevated. you need to wash it all off with water.

You’re so silly…Well I know that the sky is blue because Ice cream has no bones…but ice cream makes you thirsty from the salt.

It’s not the ice cream, it’s the coffee. Coffee has caffeine in it and that makes your body preform faster, thus making you thirstier.

I can’t stand water after ice cream, but I always have to get a glass of milk after some.

I found this reasonable-sounding explanation:

“Osmosis is the tendency for water to travel across a semi-permeable
membrane from a place of low concentration of solutes to a place of high
concentration of solutes.
When you eat ice cream, you blast your body with all sorts of solutes.
Ice cream has salts, but also sugars fats, amino acids, and more for your
body to absorb into the blood stream. When your blood becomes laden with
these chemicals, (mostly sugars) your blood becomes more “concentrated,”
giving your brain (hypothalamus) the signal of dehydration. When water in
the hypothalamus leaves to the blood through osmosis, then the blood
concentration is greater than that of the hypothalamus. This triggers the
thirst response in the body and brain.
If you were dehydrated, there would be a high concentration of solutes
in your blood, so you would become thirsty. Eating ice cream, in a sense,
makes your body think it is dehydrated, and in a sense, I suppose it is.
This is one of the reasons that diabetics are thirsty all the time.
Diabetes causes high blood glucose, and that increased concentration of
blood solutes makes the diabetic feel thirsty.”

source

There is often salt added to many things. The caffeine theory is also viable, however I will note it makes you thirsty not because it makes your body perform faster but because it is a diuretic which draws water from elsewhere in your body, and this is what triggers your desire to drink water.

The nutrition info for Starbucks ice cream shows, for a 99g serving (1/2 cup), 50 mg of sodium and 24 grams of sugar. That’s not much salt, really, but it’s a lot of sugar. By comparison, Coke Classic only has 27g of sugar per 250g, less than half the concentration of the ice cream.

This has never happened to me, thats quite strange.

@Harp – Holy crap! I didn’t even pay attention to the nutrition label, that IS a lot of sugar. Totally worth it though :P

Maybe it’s the 40% milk-fat?

Harp’s finding makes sense to me.

I always go for the glass of water after ice cream, even though I hate to wash away the last of the flavor.

Sometimes I add water to my ice cream.

@petethepothead – Why do you add water to your ice cream?

I like it that way. And it doesn’t make me as thirsty, since the water is right there in the bowl.

@petethepothead – Ahh, gotcha. lol ;P

I have never had the desire to add water to my ice cream. ALthough I will drink a glass right afterward.

I HAVE added milk to my ice cream though and made it kind of ice cream soup :)

1 cup partially frozen Orange Juice
+
3 scoops vanilla ice cream
=
Heaven
(I call it a Jubilee)

@patg7590. And some call that an Orange Julius. :-)

Mmmm.. an Orange Julius sounds goooood. I’ve never had one before.

hahaha I never knew that lol thanks!

@KrystaElyse. They are very tasty. I used to get one of them every time I went to the shopping mall being that they had a food stand that sold them. You can now find Orange Julius recipes all over the Internet but I’m not sure how closely they’re formulated around the original contents of what you find in the real Orange Julius. :-)