 Apple cider vinegar sounds a little too good to be true. It can help you lose weight, increase your good cholesterol and lower your bad cholesterol. It lowers your blood sugar, regulates blood pressure. It's good for your gut microbiome and it's antibacterial. Let's take a look at why apple cider vinegar is touted as the holy grail of elixirs. The simple answer to that is acetic acid. Found in apple cider vinegar, acetic acid is a synthetic carboxylic acid with antibacterial and antifungal properties. Although its mechanism of action is not fully known, undissociated acetic acid may enhance lipid solubility, allowing increased fatty acid accumulation on the cell membrane or in other cell wall structures. What this specifically means is that there is a beneficial impact on fat metabolism. Acetic acid is a weak acid and it can also inhibit carbohydrate metabolism resulting in subsequent death of the organism. The impact on carbohydrate metabolism can be explained pretty easily as acetic acid inhibits the body's production of certain enzymes related to this carbohydrate metabolism. Acetic acid suppressed sucrose, lactase and maltase activities in concentration various carbohydrate digestive enzymes. This is an excellent explanation to why we see people lose weight. They're not digesting the carbohydrates and the carbohydrates are just feeding gut bacteria as opposed to being stored as fat. This can also explain why apple cider vinegar might regulate blood glucose. And in the studies that we look at later, there is clear evidence that people that consume apple cider vinegar with their meal don't have as high sugar spikes afterwards. Another study on the topic of weight loss, vinegar and acetic acid also increased AMP and ATP ratios and expression levels of PAMPK, PPRY coactivator A1. And this pretty much means improved energy metabolism. If your body is more efficiently digesting carbohydrates and fat, you're probably going to be more active, feel better, lose weight. In the same study, acetic acid and apple cider vinegar also inhibited angiotension to type 1 receptor expression. This is something that's involved directly with blood pressure regulation. So if you're inhibiting something that regulates blood pressure, it makes sense as to why people have better blood pressure when consuming apple cider vinegar with their meals. Now, to me, this is sounding a little too good to be true. Can it actually lower cholesterol and increase gut cholesterol? Dietary acetic acid reduced serum total cholesterol and triglycerol first due to the inhibition of lipogenesis in the liver. Second, due to the increment of fecal bile acid excretion in rats fed a diet containing cholesterol. So this is what we saw earlier. It's inhibiting certain digestive enzymes in the liver and possibly the pancreas as well. In addition to that, what we see here is the increase in bile secretion. So consuming certain bitter and acidic foods can increase your body's ability to produce bile and possibly fat as well as protein-digesting enzymes. This will increase gut motility, which pretty much means that you're going to digest foods more efficiently and food is going to move through your digestive system quicker. So if you're digesting food incredibly efficiently and maybe it's not feeding bad gut bacteria, you're going to have more energy be more active as we said earlier. And it doesn't stop there. Apple cider vinegar aids with weight loss. It increases your gut cholesterol. And this study also demonstrates a reduction in bad cholesterol that we saw previously. The participants were randomly allocated on 30 milliliters of apple cider vinegar per day, just under two tablespoons for 12 weeks. The apple cider vinegar group significantly reduced body weight, BMI, hip circumference, visceral adiposity index and appetite score. Furthermore, plasma triglyceride and total cholesterol levels significantly decreased and high density lipoprotein cholesterol, HDL, aka the good cholesterol, concentration significantly increased in the ACV group compared to the control group. This is really significant evidence and it's pretty crazy that just by consuming apple cider vinegar, it improved these people's metabolism so much that they lost all of this weight. Cholesterol is something that people in more up-to-date health knowledge don't view as bad, but improving HDL to LDL ratio is definitely something we shouldn't be taking lightly. It's a great indicator for levels of inflammation in the body. So not only are these people losing weight, they're reducing inflammation in their body. This is, to me, concrete evidence that we should really be considering acetic acid from a health perspective as something that we need to incorporate in our daily lives. So what about gut bacteria and the gut microbiome? Various beneficial bacteria such as lactobacillus were the most commonly identified bacteria in apple juice byproducts. In apple cider vinegar, which is the result of acetic fermentation, a bunch of these beneficial bacteria were detected even if the acetic acid bacteria was substantially higher. In addition, shrimps fed a high apple cider vinegar diet significantly lowered total heterotrophic marine bacteria compared to the control group and the lowest bacterial number was observed in the shrimp fed the highest amount of apple cider vinegar. Seeing as apple cider vinegar is an antibacterial and antimicrobial and what happened in this shrimp study, to me it's pretty clear that the bacterial benefits of apple cider vinegar aren't really what we should be looking at. We shouldn't be looking at the bacteria that's inherent to the apple cider vinegar. What we should be looking at is what the vinegar or mainly the acetic acid does to our gut microbiome. Maybe it's changing metabolism of certain nutrients so that the food we're consuming is feeding gut bacteria. That could be why there's an improvement in the gut microbiome. But a great analogy to be made here is a teaspoon in a bucket of water. If you're putting a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar in your digestive system with all this other food and all these other liquids, the impact from a bacterial standpoint is so insignificant. It really doesn't make any sense that consuming that tiny amount of bacteria is going to overpower or populate your gut, especially considering how much bacteria is normally present in the microbiome. Now if you started chugging apple cider vinegar, would it make a difference in your gut microbiome? I don't really know, but I firmly believe that any benefits towards the gut microbiome and consuming a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar per day are not going to be related to the bacteria in the apple cider vinegar specifically. On the topic of stomach acid, apple cider vinegar is actually less acidic than your stomach. So if you consume apple cider vinegar, you're technically diluting your stomach acid. Why do people see improvements in their digestion when they consume apple cider vinegar? It has to do with what we said earlier about consuming acidic or bitter foods and the stimulation of things like bile and various digestive enzymes. So if you're consuming apple cider vinegar, I would be curious if you're going to get the same benefit from consuming bitters. And the properties that acetic acid has on these enzymes as well as fat and carbohydrate metabolism can easily improve your digestion. So that makes a lot of sense, but consuming apple cider vinegar is not increasing the acidity of your stomach. The pH of your stomach is as low as 1 to 1.5 and apple cider vinegar is a bit higher than that. If your stomach is not as acidic as apple cider vinegar, then you have much larger issues to be looking into. So there is definitely a lot of good research demonstrating specific mechanisms of what apple cider vinegar and I guess more specifically acetic acid do in the body. So can we deduce this to just vinegar and acetic acid? I made some high meat, some rotten meat several days ago. And upon further research, I found that any food fermented in a moist environment will develop acetic acid. So sauerkraut, kimchi, those foods that more people are familiar with. In my case, eating what is essentially rotten meat is another way to obtain this acetic acid. This ties into our indigenous roots and how every group of native peoples consumed some form of fermented food. So I don't think these benefits are specific to apple cider vinegar. I think that these benefits are just specific to fermented foods in general that were made in a natural way. And foods like high meat have a very high nutrient content because essentially they are supposed to be made from quality meat products. They have vitamins, vitamin K2. So I think consuming fermented foods is not only going to get you the benefits of acetic acid, it's also going to get you nutritional benefits in addition to bacterial benefits because we know the bacterial content of apple cider vinegar isn't too high. But rotten meat, high meat has an incredibly high bacterial content. Kimchi, sauerkraut, incredibly high bacterial contents that we can say would correlate directly to some sort of change in the gut microbiome. Now, which of these foods should you actually be consuming is, I don't think it's really up for debate, but it's definitely questionable. If you're consuming a food in your diet, normally it would be okay to ferment it. But if you're following a carnivore diet, it doesn't make a lot of sense to eat things like sauerkraut or kimchi. The food that you're eating is the food that you would ferment in the context of native and indigenous diets. The bacteria that's on that food that develops when it ferments will help you digest that food in its unfermented state. To me, keeping things that are specific to your diet makes the most sense. I'm not going to go drink kombucha after being on a carnivore diet for two months. That's a great way to mess up your gut microbiome. You want to be consuming foods that are fermented that you eat in your normal day today. Another thing that's commonly spoken about is acne and how apple cider vinegar helps your acne. But I think this would be from an oral perspective because the mechanisms that we see demonstrated by acetic acid, if you improve carbohydrate and fat metabolism, if you reduce inflammation in the body, I think these things will clear up your skin. But putting apple cider vinegar on your face is only going to destroy bacteria. So if putting apple cider vinegar on your face helps your acne, then you might have some hygiene issues. If you're washing your face properly, if you're sleeping on a fresh towel every night, I don't think apple cider vinegar is going to affect you from a transdermal perspective. But there can definitely be some benefits from consuming it orally from what I'm observing here. I remember I put apple cider vinegar on my face when I had that acne, and all it really did was burn the hell out of my skin and make my acne more inflamed. The cause of my acne was underlying dietary issues. So if you cannot fix that underlying issue in general, then don't expect your acne to get better. If the issue is your hygiene and you put apple cider vinegar on your face and your acne gets better, you technically fix the underlying issue. But if you have a dairy allergy and you're consuming apple cider vinegar and putting it on your face, don't expect your acne to magically go away. Apple cider vinegar is also a high histamine food, and this can definitely cause issues for some people. A food can be high in histamines because it is fermented or aged, or a food can cause a high level of histamine reactions in the body. Foods like eggs and dairy tend to do so. Histamines are involved in the immune system response. So when you consume apple cider vinegar, if you get a rush of energy, this could actually be related to the histamine content of the food. Definitely something important to keep in mind with not just apple cider vinegar, vinegars in general, aged foods in general. So Frankie boy, what's the deal on apple cider vinegar? Should we consume it? Ladies and gentlemen, that is for you to try yourself. I think that if you're not consuming fermented foods, that you will see a direct benefit to incorporating acetic acid in some form in your diet. For me, following a carnivore diet with high meat and fermented meat, I don't think it's necessary whatsoever. One thing I do want to tie in here is my love for food and cooking and culinary applications. There are so many different types of vinegar. You know, this benefit is not specific to apple cider vinegar. You can make a pate with sherry vinegar. You could put some champagne or white wine vinegar on some oysters. You can make a chimichurri with red wine vinegar. You can buy some expensive as hell aged balsamic of Modena and drizzle that on your steak. There are so many culinary applications for vinegar. And if it's good for you, hey, the more the merrier. I will put some vinegars on my Amazon shop in the food section. So if you guys do want to check out what vinegars that I recommend using, you can take a look at that. Outside of that, guys, thank you for watching. If you would like to support the channel, please like, subscribe, share the video if you can. As I said, my Amazon shop down below also has things like Frankie's Bulguris, aka Vitamin D3. If you guys have not heard of that joke, go check out my testosterone video last week. Patreon is a great way to ask personalized questions. If you have a specific issue that you're dealing with, if you guys do want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations in regards to improving your overall health, you can reach out to me via email frankatifano at gmail.com or through my contact form on my website frank-tifano.com. On that website is also a bunch of hygiene products such as lip balm, fluoride-free tooth powder, aluminum-free deodorant, things like that. 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