Hi everyone! This is Monica Reinagel, the Nutrition Diva, here with your Quick and Dirty Tips for Eating Well and Feeling Fabulous. This month, we’re celebrating the 1st anniversary of the Nutrition Diva podcast by giving away some great stuff. I’ll have more details about that at the end of the episode.
But in the meantime, have you heard the news about vinegar? Some new research lends support to the old wives’ tale that vinegar burns fat. Before we all start pickling ourselves, we’ll take closer look at how this new research translates into real life.
Today’s show is sponsored by Audible,
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Does Vinegar Burn Fat?
The idea of vinegar as a weight loss aid has been around for ages. It’s practically calorie free, of course. And somehow it’s easy to imagine the acidity in vinegar simply dissolving body fat on contact. Of course, things don’t really work that way. Or do they?
Last month, some Japanese researchers found that subjects who ate a high-fat diet that also included vinegar ended up with 10% less body fat than subjects who ate the same diet, minus the vinegar. And just like that, vinegar’s reputation as a weight loss miracle food has been given new legs! This study clearly demonstrates that French fries won’t make you fat if you simply sprinkle a little malt vinegar over them. Isn’t science great?
How Does it Work?
So how exactly does vinegar burn fat? Acetic acid is the thing that gives vinegar its characteristic tart or sour quality. According to the Japanese researchers, this compound also does a couple of very special things in the body. First, it activates certain genes that cause your body to store less fat around your waist. Instead the fat is deposited more evenly around the body.
Perhaps more importantly, the researchers concluded that acetic acid appears to increase thermogenesis, which is the process in which you burn body fat to create heat. Things that increase thermogenesis cause the body’s engine to run a little hotter—a little less efficiently, if you will. Increasing thermogenesis burns more calories and that can lead to weight loss.
On the surface, it certainly sounds promising. If acetic acid makes your body burn more calories and store less fat around your waist, then eating more vinegar seems like it could help fight obesity.
But, you know me--always insisting on reading you the fine print. For starters, the subjects in the Japanese study were mice. And unfortunately, things don’t always work out in humans the way they do in mice, as the late Judah Folkman was always eager to point out.
Of Mice and Men
Back in 1998, Dr. Folkman went from being an obscure researcher to a household name overnight when the media announced that he’d found the cure for cancer. Folkman had been working with a therapy called anti-angiogenesis, which cuts off the blood supply to tumors. Folkman was, in fact, curing cancer--in mice.
Unfortunately, as Folkman knew all too well, cancer had been cured in mice many times before. Just never quite so publicly. Hopes (not to mention stock futures) were dashed when Folkman’s therapy--which was an important step forward--still turned out not to be quite as effective in humans as it was in mice.
My point is that animal research is an important first step but we can’t assume that the same results apply to humans.
How Many Pickles Can you Eat?
Even if we could, there’s another small matter. Though I’m sure humans would be happy enough on the high-fat diet these mice enjoyed, I’m not sure how happy we’d be about the vinegar part of the prescription. To approach the dosage in this study, you’d have to be consuming somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 ounces of vinegar a day. That’s an awful lot of pickles.
Even if acetic acid does turn out to increase thermogenesis in humans the way it does in mice, the magnitude of this effect would probably be too small to lead to noticeable weight loss. It reminds me of the weight-loss strategies I discussed in
episode # 27, such as drinking ice water and eating negative-calorie foods like celery. Though these do increase your calorie burn, it would take an awfully long time for the extra calories you burn to add up to even one pound of weight loss.
While you’re waiting, there is one other way that vinegar might help you battle the bulge. Research--in humans--shows that adding vinegar to a meal slows down the speed at which the carbohydrates are converted to sugar in your bloodstream. And that can help ratchet down your appetite and even reduce your risk of developing diabetes.
So, there may be some benefits to keeping that bottle of balsamic close at hand. But I think we need to keep our expectations realistic.
Our thanks once again to audible.com for sponsoring today’s show. You can get a free download of your choice when you sign up today at audiblepodcast.com/diva. There are now over 60,000 titles to choose from. Perhaps today’s episode will inspire you to listen to The Billionaire’s Vinegar, which is a true story about a famous 18th century bottle of wine said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Or, check out Dr. Nancy Snyderman’s book on Diet Myths.
Visit audiblepodcast.com/diva for all the details.
Administrative
As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, next week marks my first full year doing this podcast. It’s been so much fun and I wanted to celebrate by giving some gifts to my listeners.
Two lucky listeners will be getting soda makers from
Soda Stream. You’ve heard me talk about my Soda Stream before. It’s absolutely the greatest thing ever. You make your own sparkling water for about twenty cents a liter, with no bottles to lug home from the store or recycle.
Another listener will get a case of customized snack bars from
YouBars, the very cool company that lets you pick all the ingredients and control all the nutritional details. I’ve also got copies of some of my favorite books to give away, including Marion Nestle’s
What to Eat and Tanya Steele’s
Real Food for Real Kids, which I mentioned in my recent episode on
how to get kids to eat healthy, and several others.
All subscribers to my free weekly newsletter will be automatically entered to win. You can subscribe—and see a complete list of all the stuff we’re giving away—by visiting nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com. I’m sorry to say that we lost some of your email addresses due to a technical glitch a few weeks ago. So, if you subscribed previously but haven’t been getting the newsletter recently, you might want to re-subscribe just to be sure.
I’ve also posted some links to the research on vinegar in the transcript of today’s episode. As always, please stay in touch. I love hearing from you and your input makes the show better. You’ll find me on
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nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com.
Have a great day and eat something good for me!
