Got oxygen?: Sports Vape may help you shake your blues

Culture | March 27th, 2014

What happens when we boost our oxygen intake? Most of us breathe in about 21 percent.

Darius Endres and Jeremy Veum, owners of Sports Vape, say inhaling more oxygen can help people get rid of headaches, relieve hangovers and feel a bit more euphoric. It even can boost our immune system.

“Ninety-nine percent of bacteria and viruses cannot survive in an oxygen-rich environment,” Veum said.

Sports Vape, a brand new Fargo business on University Dr., has now made it possible for locals to get access to more “fresh air” with its oxygen bar.

It’s easy, for $1 a minute for no more than 20 minutes, customers can walk in, sit down, read or watch TV, and breath in oxygen transferred to their nostrils through disposable tubes.

With Sport Vape’s oxygen bar, patrons also inhale a mild flavoring, such as cherry, eucalyptus or even “dragons blood,” for added pleasure.

“Besides getting the actual content in your body, they have aromatherapy characteristics too,” Veum said.

Aside from the oxygen bar, the business also sells e-cigarettes, including 85 different flavors of e-juice and e-cig accessories.

“Vaping” with E-cigarettes is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to smoking real cigarettes, which contain thousands of more harmful substances. E-juice contains a total of three ingredients: nicotine, propylene glycol (for vapor) and vegetable glycerin (for flavor).

While the verdict is still out with FDA on the health effects of e-cigs, Veum said “vaping” is much cheaper than smoking.

“With the 15 milliliter e-juice bottles that we sell, that’s about equivalent to a carton of cigarettes,” he said. “One of those (e-juice) bottles is $9.99. And then the e-cig kit is a one-time purchase.”

The name Sports Vape didn’t necessarily come from the fact that oxygen bars and e-cigarettes are popular for athletes. Rather, its initial business plan included selling sports apparel. Although that plan didn’t work out, the store, to live up to its name, offers off-track betting on horse races.

“In North Dakota, in order to have a gambling license, you have to be a nonprofit organization, unless you actually live on an Indian reservation,” said Endres. “So any of the bars that deal blackjack or pull tabs, all of that money goes towards a nonprofit organization. So we would just work with a nonprofit organization and they would make all of the money off of that.”

IF YOU GO:

WHAT: Sports Vape

WHERE: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday

WHEN: 1621 S. University Drive, Suite 3, Fargo

INFO: facebook.com/SportsVape

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