To the question “should I drink vinegar to control sugar?”
we should answer with another: do you need to control your blood glucose?
And it is not a silly question, since fluctuations in blood glucose are something completely normal, inevitable, and that our body manages without the slightest problem if we are healthy.
That is, it is not something that we have to worry about.
There is a belief that any elevation in blood glucose is harmful
per se
and from there we go on to obsessively control blood sugar spikes as if it were something really useful in the general population, or something that we should focus our attention on in a context that enough trips us up to eat well.
If you don't have glucose management issues, drinking vinegar is not a priority life change.
Surely there are more pertinent things to improve.
And if there aren't, then you don't need to drink vinegar because you're already doing much more effective things in the long run.
And if you already have a problem, be it insulin resistance or diagnosed type 2 diabetes, drinking vinegar is an anecdotal matter that is not going to improve your pathology and should in no way have a special relevance within the measures you take to control your metabolic glucose management.
So does vinegar affect blood sugar or is it a hoax?
Yes, it does affect.
It is true that vinegar intake reduces postprandial blood glucose when accompanied by meals rich in complex carbohydrates.
And the latter is important, because if we are going to take it to avoid the glycemic peak after having a sweet or a soft drink (rich in simple sugars), it does not work so well.
Vinegar helps control blood glucose mainly through two mechanisms: on the one hand, it delays gastric emptying, thus making food reach the intestine more slowly and lengthening the digestion process;
and on the other, due to the effect of acetic acid on the enzymes that hydrolyze the carbohydrate chains (separate them into glucose molecules), making it difficult for this to be carried out and, therefore, for the molecules to be quickly freed to be absorbed.
Other more complex mechanisms are also proposed, which curiously seem to be more effective in people who do not suffer from diabetes.
It is worth commenting that these effects have been known for a long time, it is not even remotely a discovery of the latest
fashionable
instagrammer who put on a glucometer.
Without going any further, the first article cited is from 12 years ago, but we can find a lot of scientific literature that talks about these properties of vinegar.
That is, it is a fact known to professionals.
You may be wondering then, and why haven't you nutritionists been recommending left and right for years to people that they drink vinegar?
Very simple: because it is one of the many things that can soften the blood glucose curve and it is not the first choice when we have a patient who needs this control, because we try not to fall into deceptively simple solutions to very complex problems, because we know how to contextualize the messages and because we distinguish tools that we can use in consultation from poorly focused solutions.
And that's where I wanted to go.
to focus.
The “vinegar effect”
Here I am going to allow myself to unceremoniously steal from my friend Aitor his “Cinnamon Effect”, because the truth is that his explanation works exactly the same if we call it “vinegar effect”.
Watch the video, it is less than 10 minutes, and it will be very clear to you how the misuse of informative premises that are a priori true harms more than helps.
What is happening with drinking vinegar is a full-fledged "cinnamon effect".
As he comments, the main informative error that is committed with this type of ideas is not to contextualize them adequately.
Implying that drinking vinegar has a crucial or especially relevant role in health and even setting up "methods" that revolve around this practice or that consider it a fundamental pillar is not a good approach, even if it starts from a certain premise.
But it is very attractive and commercial.
Yes indeed.
In practice, it is distracting us from truly useful and relevant actions when it comes to preventing diseases.
In this specific case, to avoid abnormally high blood glucose levels maintained over time and prevent future type 2 diabetes, or even improve it if we already have it, making drinking vinegar a central axis for this is diverting attention from what is truly useful, which This is what we will see in the next section.
More information
"When we found out that Natalia had type 1 diabetes, the worst thing was to assimilate that it is forever"
It is one more example of how starting from a true fact (as we have reviewed, it is true that vinegar has an effect on the glycemic curve) all the health advice is twisted, moving the focus to where it is not:
More attention is paid to the impact on blood glucose than to the content of the meal.
A piece of pastry is not unhealthy just because it raises blood sugar, but because of the ingredients that make it up.
If we consume it using strategies to slow the rise in blood glucose, it is still just as unhealthy.
The fruit is not worse than the sausage because the first has a greater impact on blood glucose.
We run the risk of displacing healthy foods based on unsubstantiated criteria, or believing that we should take extra precautions (drink vinegar) to consume them.
Controlling the glycemic index is not a valid parameter to determine whether or not a diet is adequate and using this criterion in the choice of foods is not a factor that improves cardiovascular risk or insulin resistance.
Prevent or treat type 2 diabetes. Where to aim?
In the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes, it is useless to apply an isolated tip or “trick”.
A global change in habits is necessary and it is all of them that will make a significant improvement in our risk of suffering from diabetes, or in its control in the event that we already have it.
There are three main factors that we should attend to, and none of them is drinking vinegar (or taking cinnamon):
Lifestyle: the reference guideline in the management of diabetes indicates changes in lifestyle as the most efficient intervention for the improvement of this pathology, with a grade of evidence A (the highest possible).
Diet, healthy weight and physical activity are indicated as fundamental pillars and specific recommendations are included in this regard.
Regarding diet, the guide literally indicates: "The evidence suggests that the overall quality of the food consumed [...] with an emphasis on whole grains, legumes, nuts, fruit, vegetables, and minimal processed and refined products, is also associated with to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes″
At no point is there talk of drinking vinegar.
If it were a really relevant strategy at the population level, don't you think that the main clinical reference guideline would include it, since the mechanism has been known for decades?
Genetics: there are people with a greater predisposition to suffer from a specific pathology and diabetes may be one of them.
In this case, prevention plays a crucial role and you have to refer back to your lifestyle, it is what will really help you keep the risk as much at bay as possible.
Pharmacology: when the pathology is established, pharmacological control with oral antidiabetics, insulin injections or any other strategy that is assessed in the medical consultation may be necessary.
The fact of taking medication does not exempt you from complying with the above points, which will help control the disease, improve symptoms and increase quality of life.
Thus, if you decide to drink vinegar, do so with the understanding that in a context that does not apply the previous points, it will not be a valid strategy, even though it can reduce the blood glucose curve at any given time (for this reason, it can be used as a specific aid).
And that if you maintain proper habits (plus taking medication if indicated in your case), drinking vinegar is not going to make a substantial difference in the long term in your risk or management of both diabetes and other pathologies related to style of life.
And above all, that if you are a healthy person, then your body is perfectly capable of managing glycemic variations, which are, on the other hand, completely normal and unavoidable, and you do not need to worry about them.
What's going to protect you from getting diabetes in the future is overall diet and physical activity, not the vinegar you've been drinking to flatten the spike in blood sugar from eating a banana.
NUTRITION WITH SCIENCE
It is a section on nutrition based on scientific evidence and the knowledge contrasted by specialists.
Eating is much more than a pleasure and a necessity: diet and eating habits are right now the public health factor that can most help us prevent numerous diseases, from many types of cancer to diabetes.
A team of dieticians-nutritionists will help us to better understand the importance of food and to demolish, thanks to science, the myths that lead us to eat badly.
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