Hippocrates the father of medicine thousands of years ago used vinegar as one of his key medicines. The father of modern medicine was a herbalist, so where are the herbs today in modern medicine? This is the challenge facing me as a herbalist and a naturopathic nutritionist, trying to help people understand the healing and health benefits of herbs and foods as medicine. In other words, providing real evidence based medicine to patients. So let’s start with the 20 health benefits of apple cider vinegar.
ACV-ACV-21 Health Benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar
Number 1: It’s rich in potassium, which is a key nutrient to feed nerves and muscles and its nurtures the heart-an essential component of good health.
Number 2: Apple cider vinegar promotes an alkaline body. According, to Charolette Gerson Cancer can’t grow in an alkaline body, and one of the main things that apple cider vinegar does is that it promotes alkalinity and neutralises acidity that comes from too much processed foods.
Number 3: It is anti-fungal, and kills bacteria. Once again this is one of the main ways it helps promote health, by killing bacteria in the mouth, in the blood, in the gut, that is blocking digestion, and causing sluggish digestion.
Number 4: Apple cider vinegar, kills bacteria in the mouth, and it’s one of the things, I have used myself to promote oral health, I have a cavity, and I have used apple cider vinegar as a great mouth wash as
a great pain killer. I will have to get the tooth removed, but the apple cider vinegar, neutralizes the bacteria, neutralizes the pain eventually. It provides good health, as we know that bacteria in the mouth is connected with heart disease, because the bacteria in the mouth, enters the blood stream.
Number 5: Apple cider vinegar, improves digestion and reduces acid reflux-a key problem for a lot of people by balancing the acid, is achieved by reducing the acidity in the body, it neutralizes acid reflux, and increases digestion and therefor a great treatment for acid reflux.
Number 6: Apple cider vinegar, is a good treatment for those with diabetes as it helps to balance blood sugar in the body. Research is backing up the use of apple cider vinegar, in the management and treatment of diabetes.
Number 7: Apple cider vinegar promotes heart health, it breaks the plaque and reduces the plaque that builds up in the arteries and reduces cholesterol and therefore helps to promote heart health. It is rich in potassium which helps in strengthening the heart muscle.
Number 8: Apple cider vinegar, promotes good skin health and from the inside out by having a good digestion. The best place to have good skin is on the inside, by having good digestion. It promotes cleansing through the biggest organ in the body which is the skin which can be achieved by rubbing on the skin to reduce blemishes and increase the vibrancy of the skin.
Number 9: Apple cider vinegar, can be used to treat warts, soaked on to a cotton piece of wool and placed over the wart, twice a day topically, it can help to reduce that wart over time.
Number 10: To create lush hair. Apple cider vinegar can be rubbed into the hair, it’s a great conditioner and helps to strengthen the hair, and increase the shine, of your hair so apple cider vinegar, in your hair, it might smell, but you can wash it off later with shampoo.
Number 11: Apple cider vinegar can be used to reduce weight and obesity. It has an appetite suppressing effect when you take apple cider vinegar. It has that bitter taste and it helps to improve digestion and reduce appetite.
Number 12: Apple cider vinegar reduces sinus congestion, by breaking the mucus that gets clogged up in the system. Apple cider vinegar helps to break it down, and give relief to the sinus pathways.
Number 13: Apple cider vinegar helps when you have a sore throat. It’s that anti-bacterial effect. It can be used as a mouth wash, gargled and swallowed. It kills the bacteria that is causing throat infection.
Number 14: Apple cider vinegar, gives you an energy boost. The potassium and the enzymes, contained within ACV speeds up the process of nutrients getting to the cells and cleansing the cells. It leads to better health, better vitality and better energy.
Number 15: Apple cider vinegar is a natural teeth whitener. ACV can be used as a mouthwash as I said earlier, and that can help to whiten the teeth over time, when practiced on a regular basis
Number 16: ACV helps to fight seasonal allergies. It breaks down the mucus, improves lymphatic drainage, and has an overall health benefit on reducing the impact of allergies.
Number 17: Apple cider vinegar, can be used to treat cold sores, because it is loaded with probiotics and vitamins. This helps to boost the immune system and boost the response to cold sores from within.
Number 18: Apple cider vinegar helps to soothe sun burn. When ACV is mixed with coconut oil and some lavender oil, and rubbed on to the skin, it has a great calming relief for sun burn.
Number 19: ACV is a natural deodorant as it kills the bad bacteria and the yeast that causes odours. It can be applied topically to areas under the arm pits or around the toes, where there can be body odour.
Number 20: ACV is a natural household cleanser. We know it is great for cleaning windows. But we know that it has an anti-bacterial effect. ACV can be used to kill bacteria.
Finally number. 21: ACV Improves bone health, It has that alkaline effect that improves our overall health and then improves our bone health.
Does Apple Cider Vinegar Help with Weight loss?”
Vinegar has evidently been used as a weight-loss aid for nearly 200 years, but does it work? Well, like hot sauce, it can be a nearly calorie-free way to flavor foods, and there’s all sorts of tasty exotic vinegars out there now like fig, peach, and pomegranate to choose from. But the question is: is there something special about vinegar that helps with weight loss? Vinegar is defined as simply a dilute solution of acetic acid, which takes energy for our body to metabolize, activating an enzyme called AMPK, which is like our body’s fuel gauge.
If it senses that we’re low, it amps up energy production, and tells the body to stop storing fat and start burning fat. And so given our obesity epidemic, it is crucial that oral compounds with high bioavailability are developed to safely induce chronic AMPK enzyme activation, which would potentially be beneficial for long-term weight loss. No need to develop such a compound, though, if you can buy it at any grocery store. We know vinegar can activate AMPK in human cells, but is the dose one might get sprinkling it on a salad enough? If you take endothelial cells, blood-vessel-lining cells, from umbilical cords after babies are born and expose them to various levels of acetate, which is what the acetic acid in vinegar turns into in our stomach, it appears to take a concentration of at least 100 to really get a significant boost in AMPK. So how much acetate do you get in your bloodstream sprinkling about a tablespoon of vinegar on your salad? You do hit 100, but only for about 15 minutes. And even at that concentration, 10 or 20 minutes exposure doesn’t seem to do much.
Now granted this is in a Petri dish, but we didn’t have any clinical studies until. . . we did! A double blind trial investigating the effects of vinegar intake on the reduction of body fat in overweight men and women. Now they call them obese, but they were actually slimmer than your average American. In Japan they call anything over a BMI of 25 obese, whereas the average American adult is about 28.6. But anyway, they took about 150 overweight individuals, and randomly split them up into one of three groups: a high dose vinegar group, where they drank a beverage containing 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar a day; a low dose group, where they drank a beverage containing only 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar a day; and a placebo control group where they had them drink an acidic beverage they developed to taste the same as the vinegar drink but using a different kind of acid, so there was no acetic acid.
No other changes in their diet or exercise. In fact, they monitored their diets and gave them all pedometers so they could make sure that the only significant difference between the three groups was the amount of vinegar they were getting every day. This is where they started out. And within just one month, statistically significant drops in weight in both vinegar groups compared to placebo, with higher dose doing better than low dose, which just got better and better, month after month.
In fact, by month three, the do-nothing placebo group actually gained weight, as overweight people tend to do, whereas the vinegar groups significantly dropped their weight. Now, was the weight loss actually significant or just kind of statistically significant? Well, that’s for you to decide. This is in kilograms, so compared to placebo, the 2 tablespoons of vinegar a day group dropped five pounds by the end of the 12 weeks. That may not sound like a lot, but they got that for just pennies a day, without removing anything from their diet. And they got slimmer, up to nearly an inch off their waist, suggesting they were losing abdominal fat, but the researchers went the extra mile and put it to the test.
They put the research subjects through abdominal CT scans to actually directly measure the amount of fat before and after in their bodies. They measured the amount of superficial fat, visceral fat, and total body fat. Superficial fat is the fat under your skin that makes for flabby arms and contributes to cellulite. But visceral fat is the killer. That’s the fat, shown here in white, building up around your internal organs that bulges out the belly. And that’s the kind of fat the placebo group was putting on when they were gaining weight. Not good. But both the low dose and high dose vinegar groups were able to remove about a square inch of visceral fat off that CAT scan slice. Now like any weight loss strategy, it only works if you do it. A month after they stopped the vinegar, the weight crept back up, but that’s just additional evidence that the vinegar was working. But how? A group of researchers in the UK suggested an explanation: vinegar beverages are gross. They made a so-called palatable beverage by mixing a fruity syrup and vinegar in water, and then went out of their way to make a really nasty unpalatable vinegar beverage, both with white wine vinegar, which were so unpleasant the study subjects actually felt nauseous after drinking them, so ate less of the meal they gave it with.
So there you go — vinegar helps with both appetite control and food intake, though these effects were largely due to the fruity vinegar concoctions invoking feelings of nausea. So is that what was going on here? Were the vinegar groups just eating less? No, the vinegar groups were eating about the same compared to placebo. Same diet, more weight loss, thanks perhaps, to the acetic acid’s impact on AMPK. Now the CT scans make this a very expensive study, so I was not surprised it was funded by a company that sells vinegars, which is good, since otherwise we wouldn’t have these amazing data. But is also bad because it always leaves you wondering if the funding source somehow manipulated the results. But the nice thing about companies funding studies about healthy foods, whether it’s some kiwifruit company, or the National Watermelon Promotion Board — watermelon.org check it out — is that what’s the worst that can happen? Here, for example. If the findings turned out to be bogus, worse comes to worse, your salad would just be tastier.
Watch the video below to watch a powerful recipe using Apple cider vinegar for weight loss.
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