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Definition: "An ergogenic aid is any substance or phenomenon that enhances performance "

18.11.2009

Cherry juice speeds up marathon runners' muscle recovery

Endurance athletes who drink cherry juice every day from five days before to two days after a marathon recover faster than runners who don't do so. Sports scientists at Northumbria University in Great Britain write about this in a soon-to-be-published article in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports. The British researchers did a trial with twenty recreational athletes who ran the London Marathon.

The researchers gave their test subjects bottles of Cherrypharm tart cherry juice. There's no mention in the publication that Cherrypharm helped finance the study, although it does say that Cherrypharm provided the bottles. Nevertheless, Glyn Howatson, the first author of the study, has published the research findings in documents that not only bear the university logo, but also the Cherrypharm logo. Researchers usually use company logos when they’ve had money from them.

Hmm.

We found the pdf above on www.rakergoldstein.com. Raker Goldstein is a PR company that specialises in 'creative marketing for creative companies'. The first sentence on the website reads: "Public relations is one of the wisest investments management can make in the health of a company". Cherrypharm is a Raker Goldstein client. Its logo adorns the home page of rakergoldstein.com.

The research was officially paid for by the Scholarship and Research Support Fund of the university of the first author of the article. We wonder if this happened after Cherrypharm had just happened to make an interesting donation to that fund.

Still.

The researchers got half of their marathon runners to drink two bottles of cherry juice a day for the duration of the experiment. That gave the runners "40mg anthocyanins, 560mg of other flavonoid compounds, such as the flavonols quercetin, kaempferol and isoramnetin and their glucosides, flavanols such as catechin, epicatechin and procyanidins and their glucosides and phenolic acids such as neochlorogenic acid, 3-coumaroylquinic acid, chlorogenic acid and ellagic acid." This impressive amount of phenols is equivalent to eating fifty cherries. So you could just eat the cherries if you believe in the results of this study, which would probably be healthier too.

The researchers found that the runners who had drunk the juice had fewer signs of muscle damage after the marathon. The Cherrypharm users had lower concentrations of typical markers such as TBARS, interleukin-6, creatine kinase and CRP. The figure below shows that the Cherrypharm users regained strength more rapidly in their leg muscles.

The cherry juice didn't make the test subjects run faster. In fact the runners weren't that fast.

We don't believe those Cherrypharm stories. We refuse to be deceived by those smooth-talking PR trolls.

Source:
Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2009 Oct 21. [Epub ahead of print].