Q: I read in your column that pickle juice can ease cramps. However, you left out a lot of details.
1. What is the recommended dosage?
2. How many times a day should it be taken?
3. When should it be taken – morning, evening, bedtime, before meal, with food or after meal?
A: It is always tricky to pin down the details of a home remedy, but we will do our best. The first study we noticed that tested pickle juice for cramps used electricity to cause a cramp in the big toe (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, May 2010). The researchers found that giving the young men pickle juice as soon as the cramp started shortened it from 2 1/2 minutes to not quite two minutes. They drank about 1/3 cup of pickle juice (approximately 75 ml).
The makers of the HotShot, a product designed to treat muscle cramps, now recommend drinking 1.7 ounces of their formulation half an hour before starting a strenuous workout as a cramp preventative. This product increased cramp threshold frequency, or CTF, in a placebo-controlled trial (European Journal of Applied Physiology, August 2017). CTF is a measurement of cramp susceptibility, and a higher threshold means a person is less likely to cramp.
• article by Joe and Teresa Graedon ; copyright The Seattle Times