The Clever Guts Diet by Dr Michael Mosley

Author:Dr Michael Mosley [Michael Mosley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780723051
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Apple cider vinegar

You may not have come across kimchi or kefir, but you will probably have tried apple cider vinegar. This is another fermented food that is now hugely popular, and we have included a number of recipes that contain it.

The actress Scarlett Johansson apparently washes her face with a diluted version of the stuff, while the Arctic explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes also swears by it, claiming he beat his arthritis thanks to a vinegary drink (four parts apple cider vinegar to one part raw honey).

More heavyweight endorsement comes from Hippocrates of Kos, often described as the ‘Father of Western Medicine’. Hippocrates was a great believer in the power of the body to heal itself. To help the body on its way he often prescribed vinegar and fasting. He described fasting as ‘the physician within’ and claimed that ‘to eat when you are sick is to feed your sickness’. As for vinegar, he recommended its use for a wide range of things, from cleaning wounds to sorting out a persistent cough. But does it really have any remarkable health-giving properties?

I recently teamed up with Dr James Brown from Aston University to find out. The first thing we decided to test was the claim that drinking a couple of tablespoons of vinegar before a meal will help control your blood sugar levels and prevent blood sugar spikes.

We started by recruiting some healthy volunteers and asked them to eat a bagel. James measured their blood sugar levels before and after.

As expected, bagel consumption was followed by a large and rapid rise in their blood sugar levels. The next day we asked them to eat another bagel, but this time they had to knock back a shot of dilute apple cider vinegar just before doing so. This reduced the amount of sugar going in to our volunteers’ blood by almost 50 per cent.

James was delighted with this finding. ‘There have been studies which suggest this happens in people who are at high risk of diabetes,’ he told me, ‘but I’m not sure it’s been shown in healthy volunteers before so I was pleasantly surprised.’

This probably happens because the acetic acid in the vinegar suppresses the activity of an enzyme called disaccharidase, which breaks down starches and complex sugars, enabling them to be more rapidly absorbed by the body. If the enzyme is blocked, far less sugar gets absorbed.

But would apple cider vinegar drinkers come out better in other measures, such as weight loss, lower cholesterol or reduced inflammation?

James divided volunteers into three groups. For eight weeks, the first group had to consume two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar just before lunch and dinner, either mixed with water or on a salad. The second group were asked to do the same with malt vinegar and the final group got vinegary-smelling water (placebo).

By the end of eight weeks none of them had lost any weight, though the apple cider drinkers were very positive about the experience. A woman with mild arthritis told me, ‘I have had less aches and pains in my joints, especially after exercise.

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