Monday, March 31, 2014

Maybe I Shouldn't Have Had A V8

I love V8 vegetable juice and have since I was kid. If blood tasted like V8 I would become the least sparkly vampire you have ever seen. I have been known to drink an entire 64 ounce plastic bottle in a day...and can easily knock back 32 ounces in one sitting. I can't shotgun beers, but I can chug a 12 ounce can of V8 like there is no tomorrow.

The thing is, V8 is supposed to be good for you, and I suppose it is in moderation. Most things are good in moderation, except for maybe black tar heroin, but V8 isn't heroin. It turns out that V8 is basically a salt lick in fluid form. One 12 ounce serving of V8 contains 600mg of sodium, 25% of your recommended daily intake. That's a lot of sodium. It's not quite ramen noodles sodium levels, but it is still an ass load.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, it's because I have a sneaking suspicion that my V8 consumption is having a negative effect on me physically. My last two piss poor runs have one thing in common - copious amounts of V8 consumed the night before. Take, for example, last night. I drank two pints of V8 in the early evening and about a 1/2 pint before bed...and then drank about a 1/2 pint with breakfast. That's a lot of V8 in under 12 hours! When I ran this afternoon I felt awful, I couldn't set a decent pace and my calves and hamstrings felt super tight. At around the 3 mile mark I had to pause my run to adjust my right shoe because my foot felt tingly and numb. Four miles into my run and I had to stop to walk because my left calf was acting up. It was a really crappy run and I'm pretty sure having so much sodium in my system was to blame. Sodium in the body pulls water from the cells and makes the heart work harder due to increased blood volume. High sodium can also cause swelling in the extremities...like your feet...causing numbness and tingling. Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but even I can add this up and come to the conclusion that V8 in the amounts I sometimes drink it just isn't healthy. That means I'm going to have to start eating more actual vegetables, which is fine...I suppose...

Another benefit of cutting the sodium from V8 out of my life will be that I won't look like a salt crusted Christmas Day prime rib after runs. Seriously, after my craptacular run last week my shirt had visible salt stains...after a short 3 miles! That just isn't normal....

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