The thought of dumping out your pickles to drink the pickle brine might sound gross to you, but cyclists and triathletes have been using it for years to beat cramping. Tennis player Carlos Alcaraz was seen sipping on pickle juice at the 2023 final at Wimbledon. An ounce of pickle juice has 25 calories with a whopping 877 milligrams of sodium which will put you at 38% of your sodium limit for the day. Pickle juice also has trace amounts of calcium and potassium, so you won’t get a healthy balance of electrolytes with pickle juice.
What’s the deal with pickle juice, then? Liver specialist Dr. Elliot Tapper told Today that it’s the acid in pickle juice that stops cramping. “When the acid enters the mouth and it splashes the back of the throat, there is a nerve receptor there that is sensitive to acid,” Tapper said. “When that receptor fires, it communicates down the spinal cord where the cramp is happening.”
Tapper’s 2022 study in The American Journal of Gastroenterology looked at the effect of pickle juice on people with cirrhosis who were experiencing muscle cramps. Those who drank pickle juice whenever they experienced cramping had reduced the severity of their cramps compared to people who drank water.