Use Vinegar to Improve Insulin Levels

Can't decide which salad dressing to get when you're out for lunch? Go for the vinaigrette. An increasing body of research is supporting the use of vinegar to control blood sugar and reduce the risk of developing diabetes.

From the ScienceDaily article: "The vinegar study, which was published in Diabetes Care, involved 10 people with type 2 diabetes, 11 people with prediabetes who are at high risk for diabetes and eight healthy people. Before eating a breakfast of orange juice and a bagel with butter, which contained 87 grams of carbohydrates, the participants were assigned to consume 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar in a glass of water sweetened with saccharine, or a placebo. A week later, the placebo and vinegar groups switched, and then ate the same breakfast.

The researchers, led by Carol Johnston, PhD, RD, a professor of nutrition at Arizona State University, measured the participants' blood sugar before and after the breakfast. They found that vinegar consumption slowed the rise of blood sugar after the high-carbohydrate meal. In all three groups, the vinegar led to improvements in blood sugar levels after the meal, though it had the biggest impact on people with prediabetes, cutting their blood sugar levels after the meal by 34 percent. In people with diabetes, blood sugar levels dropped by about 20 percent with the vinegar."

Researchers believe that vinegar reduces the rise in blood sugar that occurs after a meal by interfering with the absorption of the high-carbohydrate foods. "The acetic acid in vinegar may inhibit enzymes that digest starch," Dr. Johnston explains. "So the carbohydrate molecules aren't available for absorption and are eliminated as fecal matter."

However, many strength athletes use vinegar when trying to gain weight in an effort to reduce the accretion of body fat that often accompanies "bulking cycles" in training. Anecdotal evidence suggests that vinegar makes the body more sensitive to insulin, which reduces the amount of insulin needed after a meal to process the calories. This lowers blood sugar levels, as found in the study (the lower percentage of improvement in the diabetics likely results from their already compromised insulin function), but it also minimizes the amount of calories stored as fat and increases the storage of glucose in muscle tissue.

Choose vinegar that contains 5 percent acetic acid. Different types of vinegar, including balsamic, red wine, apple cider, and white vinegar, may have this concentration. One to two tablespoons before a meal should be adequate to obtain the desired increase in insulin sensitivity.