Drinking pickle juice relieves muscle cramps: study
June 16, 2010
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Lesley Ciarula Taylor
STAFF REPORTER
Your grandmother and your high school coach were right: A swig of pickle juice does stop muscle cramps.
A favourite folk remedy has won scientific approval after years of study and speculation.
In a double-blind study, researchers compared the effects of drinking the dregs from jars of Vlasic pickles or deionized water.
The results were clear: the induced cramps went away in 85 seconds in the people who drank pickle juice, compared with 150 seconds for those who drank deionized water.
The reasons still aren’t, though. The response is too quick for the juice to even make it out of the stomach, said lead researcher Dr. Kevin Miller of North Dakota State University.
Which means, he said, that something in pickle juice triggers a neurological response that starts in the mouth or the top of the esophagus.
“The brain sends a message to the spinal cord and to the alpha motor neurons telling them to relax.”
Researchers don’t know why or what it is in pickle juice that acts so quickly.
“The relief was happening so fast, it can’t be a metabolic effect,” said Miller, who has studied the pickle-juice phenomenon since 2008.
His first study established that 25 per cent of athletic trainers in the United States used pickle juice as part of their arsenal of treatment.
Pickle juice took on a mystic quality after the Philadelphia Eagles football team disclosed it was their secret weapon in a 41-14 season-opener victory over the Dallas Cowboys on a hot, humid day in Dallas in 2000.
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Miller’s study last year at Brigham Young University was designed to examine whether pickle juice increases the electrolytes and sodium in a person’s system. They found it had no effect on the blood system measured at five-minute intervals up to 60 minutes.
Because of that, researchers knew in this latest study that the pickle-juice effect on cramping wasn’t because the juice was in the bloodstream.
Test subjects had to down 75 millilitres of pickle juice or, as Miller put it, “a double shot,” which took two or three swallows.
Would more juice mean quicker relief? That’s the goal of another study.
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