( Which research chemical company will be the first to offer clenbuterol in pickle juice ? )
Gatorade isn't the only greenish drink that athletes crave. A new study indicates that pickle brine could help athletes when they need it most.
Researchers say the juice at the bottom of a pickle jar is more effective at staving off crippling muscle cramps than water.
To prove the salty premise long believed by some trainers and serious athletes, scientists induced toe cramps in male college students after forcing the subjects to bike to the point of mild dehydration. The average cramp lasted about two minutes and 30 seconds.
A new study has revealed that pickle brine might be more effective than sports drinks at treating muscle cramps, confirming a longstanding assumption in the sports world. Football players, cyclists and triathletes have been sipping dill-flavored drinks, including bottles of Pickle Juice Sport, for years.
They then repeated the experiment and gave the cramp-afflicted athletes "2.5 ounces of either deionized water or pickle juice, strained from a jar of ordinary Vlasic dills," according to The New York Times' Well blog.
Those who downed the brine stopped complaining of cramping within 85 seconds -- about 37 percent faster than the water drinkers and 45 percent faster than when they didn't drink anything at all.
The study might come as a shock to some fitness fanatics, but it didn't surprise Brandon Brooks, who has been selling a dill-flavored athletic drink called Pickle Juice Sport for years.
"I rolled it out as a novelty beverage, but pretty soon the trainers and the teams were saying, 'You guys have the tiger by the tail here -- you don't know what you're dealing with,'" said Brooks, who's found a way to brew the drink without even using any pickles.
Brooks' beverage has become a common sight on the bike frames of cyclists, in the fridges of triathletes, and even on NFL sidelines, where he says the New York Giants have been his biggest customer.
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