No way will loading up on Sodium do anything other than give you an increase in getting heart disease. For the straightope on what athletes should be drinking why not start at http://www.sportsci.org/links/nutrition.html
Well, the vinegar V/S antacid might go well for a low stomach acid, but anyone with even the tiniest ulcer will experience something similar to a mild volcano. I know, because I have a small ulcer and I love things pickled and I love sips of the juice and I buy antacids by the carload when I go on a binge. After pigging out on pickles, vinegar based salad dressing, a few of those delicious pepperoni, some pizza and perhaps a mouthful or two of good sweet or garlic pickle nectar – even those little pepcide a/c pills require a roll of Tums for fire control.
(Did I mention pickled eggs? Pickled pigs feet? Those scrumptious, evil and greasy but oh so tasty red sausage chunks floating in that vile but mostly vinegar red fluid? MMMM good! I wonder if Tums will make industrial grade tablets soon? Tums in a drum? Just back the truck up to my house.)
The whole idea with it was that the Eagles trainers, or doctors or whoever, told them that it would help combat cramping. I guess it was well over 100 degrees where they had their training camp, and they were worried about dehydration and cramping. Apparently they had no problems with cramps during training camp, and they had no problems during their first game in Dallas on Sunday where the temperature on the field was 118. Of course, I didn’t hear anything about any of the Cowboys cramping up, either. And they weren’t drinking pickle juice. I guess the idea is not that pickle juice is a performance enhancer, but that it is a cramp inhibitor.
sunshine is on the money. The Eagles took 2 ounce shots before the game, as a replacement for salt pills. Salt pills actually tend to cause gastric discomfort, so the pickle juice was a good trade. Dill pickle juice.
part of the rationale is that you can drink as much water as you want, but as soon as your salt/water ratio gets met, you won’t be as thirsty (even if you really do need more water). The pickles make you want to drink more water,. and help with cramps.
Soon we will see team members sneaking up on their coaches and dumping a giant jar of Vlasic on them.
Lots of useful information there. They were quoted at the end of that USA Today article about football teams and pickle juice…
Earlier this season there was a College team that used pickle juice to avoid cramps and dehydration during a game. It was well covered by the media on the sidelines, even showed the large empty jar they had dispensed it from. Someone mentioned that a players grandma had given them the idea. It was very hot on the field that day, in the hundreds,and this was a southern team I believe. I cannot recall which team though they did say it seemed to work.
BTW: JBFarley, Kippered Herring! Great Line!!!
hm. I guess I just don’t get it. To me, it sounds like a macho posture, since there isn’t (as far as the SDMB can tell and we ARE the authority!) anything in pickle juice that isn’t in Gatorade. namely, water, electrolytes, and possibly, sugar.
Not all pickles are preserved with vinegar (acetic acid). Many traditional recipes call for the cukes to be fermented in a salt solution by a salt-loving strain of bacteria which produces lactic acid. These are called brine pickles or fermented pickles. If I am not mistaken, dill pickles are traditionally made this way (as is sauerkraut), but this type of pickling tends to be frowned upon by health departments. I don’t have a jar of commercially packed pickles so I can’t recite the ingredients list. (The only dill pickles I have the ones I fermented myself the old-fashioned way.)
This just in! Hey, better late than never. The October issue of Georgia Tech Sports Medicine & Performance states:
Pickle Juice for Cramps?..A dill pickle contains about 5 calories and 260-330 mg of sodium. a sweet pickle provides more calories (30-40) but less sodium (170-210) than a dill. Whether the proporitions of calories and sodium are about the same in pckle juice or even if they are more concentrated, there is no reearch showing that pickle juice contains anything more beneficial than that which is contained in sports drinks…
Well this explains a lot!
The only difference between Gatorade and pickle juice is that the pickle juice is actually drinkable.