Strange as it might seem, including some vinegar in your diet may improve your blood sugar. Although vinegar has a bit of a checkered past — it has too often been hyped in weight-loss diets and miracle cures — solid research has clearly shown that it can improve glycemic control.
“Scientific studies over the past 10 years show benefits from vinegar
consumption,” says Carol Johnston, Ph.D., head of the nutrition
department at Arizona State University, Tempe. Vinegar decreases both
fasting and postprandial (after-meal) glucose levels, she says. “It’s
inexpensive and can be easily incorporated into the diet. Used in
combination with diet and exercise, it can help many people with type 2 diabetes.”
Much of the vinegar research comes out of Johnston’s laboratory and
that of Elin Ostman, Ph.D., at Lund University in Lund, Sweden.The biologically active constituent of vinegar is acetic acid, also the source of the liquid’s lip-puckering pungency. Nobumasa Ogawa, Ph.D., of Tokyo University in Tokyo, discovered that the acetic acid inhibits the activity of several carbohydrate-digesting enzymes, including amylase, sucrase, maltase, and lactase. As a result, when vinegar is present in the intestines, some sugars and starches temporarily pass through without being digested, so they have less of an impact on blood sugar
n another study, Johnston found that taking 2 tablespoons of apple-cider vinegar along with 1 ounce of cheese before bedtime led to a 4 to 6 percent decrease in fasting blood sugar levels, according to an article in Diabetes Care (November 2007). Meanwhile, Lund University’s Ostman found that people were less hungry a couple hours after consuming vinegar with bread, as opposed to bread alone, according to a report in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (September 2005).
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