Deceased VARC member Carl Benckert used to eat mustard packages when ever he had a cramp in his legs.
There is actually scientific data behind this.
Have We Discovered a Cure for Muscle Cramps?
"For much of the 20th century, physiologists believed that athletes cramped because they became dehydrated or lost electrolytes through sweating. But that hypothesis fell out of favor in the late 1990s, when a South African doctor named Martin Schwellnus theorized that distorted neural signaling between an athlete’s muscles and the spine was the true culprit. When you’re fatigued, he proposed, the motor reflex responsible for sending a “relax” signal to the spine becomes tired. When this happens, the “contract” signal keeps firing, and muscles become stuck. With no definitive research on how to combat the faulty signal, athletes were left with two options: don’t push too hard, or stop to stretch when cramps happen."
Bean and MacKinnon, intrigued by the neuromuscular hypothesis, figured there was a third solution. Both men had studied the nervous system throughout their careers, and MacKinnon’s Nobel Prize was awarded for work he’d done on ion-channel receptors, which control how electrical signals are transmitted between cells.
As they pored over the existing research, Bean and MacKinnon zeroed in on one thing:
even though cramps didn’t have any relation to electrolyte balances, some studies showed that drinking pickle juice or eating mustard helped prevent them. The pair knew that pickle juice and mustard contain molecules called ion-channel activators, which trigger nerves in the digestive system. These activators are why spicy foods feel hot: they don’t burn you, but they trigger the same nerve response that occurs when you come into contact with heat. Bean and MacKinnon wondered whether the activators in pickle juice and mustard were simultaneously calming nerves in other parts of the body that are responsible for muscle contraction.
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