Nine gin-soaked raisins a day, for stiff hands

The sulfur people credit for it arrives in milligrams. The trials that tested sulfur used grams.

The recipe is simple: cover golden raisins with gin, leave the bowl uncovered for a week or two until the gin dries off, eat nine a day. It went round on American radio in the 1990s and it is circulating again this week. My verdict: low risk for most people, no dose behind either mechanism, and one flag if sulfites bother you.

⚡ 10-Second Pulse

Where do you stand on the raisin jar?

🍇 Tried it 👀 Heard of it 🤔 New to me

Two explanations get offered for why the jar should work. The first is juniper, the botanical that flavours gin. Juniper extracts have damped inflammatory markers in test tubes, and juniper leaf compounds reduced paw swelling in rats with induced arthritis. Neither has been repeated in people. The recipe also asks you to let the gin evaporate, so the juniper oils, which are volatile, largely leave with it.

The second is sulfur. Golden raisins stay pale because the grapes are fumigated with sulfur dioxide, at 2,000 to 3,500 parts per million during processing, then washed and dried, which leaves a residue somewhere between about 100 and 2,000 ppm. Nine raisins weigh roughly 4.5 grams. At a mid-range residue that is about 4.5 mg of sulfur dioxide. MSM, the sulfur compound tested in joint trials, is given at 3 to 6 grams a day, and even at that dose the results are mixed. The jar delivers roughly a thousandth of it.

No controlled trial has ever compared the raisins with a placebo, in the roughly thirty years the recipe has been passed around. Hand pain also swings on its own from week to week, which is what makes uncontrolled reports so easy to collect and so hard to read.

trials of the remedy

raisins in the daily dose

4.5 mg

est. sulfur in nine

If you enjoy the ritual, nine raisins a day will not hurt most people. Just do not let it stand in for the one hand treatment that has been through randomised trials, which is below and takes five minutes.

Read the bag first. In the US, sulfites have to be declared on the label above 10 ppm, so the packet tells you whether yours are sulfured. If sulfites set off your asthma, a daily raisin habit is a daily sulfite dose, and this one is not for you. Unsulphured golden raisins are the other side of that coin: they are darker, they carry no sulfur, and they remove the mechanism people credit.

✅ The 5-Minute Fix

Do the hand set once today. Ten slow full fists to full finger spread. Then touch your thumb to each fingertip, twice round. Then roll a facecloth, squeeze it for five seconds, ten times each hand. In a Cochrane review of hand exercise, five trials in 381 people showed a small drop in hand pain, and four trials in 368 people a larger drop in finger stiffness. The benefit faded once people stopped, so this is a daily habit, not a course.

I’m trying this → Join today’s streak

More Hand Wins

●	Warm hands move further. Run them under warm water for a minute before the set, or do the set straight after the washing up.
●	Fatten the handles. A thin handle loads the base of the thumb hardest. Slide foam tubing onto the pen and the peeler you use most, today.
●	Watch the hour after. Those same trials logged four side effects across 309 people, mostly a sorer hand. If soreness outlasts an hour, halve that move’s reps at the next session rather than dropping the set.

Quick Vote

Which one are you starting today?

🖐 The 5-minute hand set

🍇 The raisin jar

From the Mailbag

“I don’t drink. Is there alcohol left in the raisins?”

Bev, 66

A trace at most, Bev. The bowl sits uncovered until the gin has gone, which takes a week or two, and alcohol is the part that evaporates first. That is also the catch: the same evaporation carries off the juniper oils people are hoping to swallow. If you avoid alcohol, there is nothing left in the jar worth the wait, so put the five minutes into the hand set instead.

Got an ache question? I read every one.

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Keep moving,

The Ache Report

P.S. Fingers are at their stiffest in the first minutes after waking. Ten slow fists under the covers, before your feet hit the floor, makes the first grip of the day cost less.

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Nine gin-soaked raisins a day, for stiff hands

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