| What's this ‘hornet juice' stuff I keep hearing about? |
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VAAM is a new sports drink, being blamed for the performance increases of the Japanese teams success at the Sydney Olympics. The VAAM Website reports that Marathon winner Naoko Takahashi, “consumed the stomach juices of giant killer hornets during training and during the event itself”. So what exactly is VAAM ? The drink VAAM is, surprisingly, not made from hornet larvae, as you would have to ‘milk’ over 1000 hornet larvae just to get 1 litre of VAAM. Instead, a man made version of the amino acids found in wasp larvae stomach juice, has been made instead, rather than a genuine extract of the stomach juice itself. So has VAAM been shown to improve performances? There is some evidence that VAAM improves endurance swimming performance in mice; in some circumstances by over 30%. The human studies show no effects on fat oxidation or exercise performance. I suspect that if there was evidence, it would come from the collection of amino acids, as they don’t use the hornet stomach juice. Amino acids as you know are an excellent aid to training when used in the correct potency and amounts. I also forget to mention that to achieve the same results as used to improve the performance in the mice you will need to drink more than 2 litres of VAAM, 30 minutes before you exercise. I’d rather stick to a whey protein drink or some amino acid capsules. Cheaper, more effective and less likely to make you vomit! A closing thought, how would you ever find out that drinking large amounts of Hornet stomach juice increased performance in the first place -hmmm?  |
