Some comments: like many books of this type, most (if not all) of the real life anecdotes are about people who succeeded in using the tips in order to lose weight and improve their health. One does not read about people who tried but failed (the winner's bias). A very important fact to remember is that everybody is different, and what works on person A may not work on person B. That said, there is an example of comparing the author to someone called Luna in the final section of the book, "You are special". I quote:
In 2019 I helped my friend Luna get fitted with a glucose monitor and recruited her for a very challenging experiment. First, we ate the exact same breakfast and lunch that didn’t spike us. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, I baked cookies, took ice cream out of the freezer, and asked her to eat them at the same time as I did. What happened was mind-blowing. A humongous spike for me, barely a spike for her. Neither of us exercised for two hours before or two hours after eating, and no vinegar was consumed. You may be wondering what the heck is going on. Why did the cookies and ice cream shoot my glucose levels through the roof but not hers? This wasn’t a fluke or an isolated experiment. Starting in 2015, research teams around the world have found the same peculiar result: the same food can create different responses depending on the person.
One important insight from the book that food manufacturers try to suppress: not all calories are equal. Taking the example of glucose and fructose (the components of table sugar), they have the same calorific content. Glucose has a higher glycemic index than fructose, but fructose can cause nonalcoholic fatty liver disease because glucose is metabolised everywhere, but fructose is metabolised only in the liver.
The science behind the 'vinegar hack' is that acetic acid slows down the action of the enzyme alpha amylase that converts starch into glucose. As a result, sugar and starch are transformed into glucose more slowly, and the glucose hits our system more softly. You may recall from hack 1, “Eat foods in the right order,” that fiber also has this effect on alpha-amylase, which is one of the reasons fiber helps flatten our glucose curves, too. But not only that: the acetic acid gets into the bloodstream and from there to muscles, and apparently encourages our muscles to make glycogen faster than they usually would, which in turn leads to more efficient uptake of glucose. These two factors—glucose being released into the body more slowly and our muscles uptaking it more quickly—mean that there is less free-flowing glucose present, so less of a glucose spike.
Inchauspé writes that lemon juice does not have the same effect because it contains citric acid, not acetic acid (hack 7). But an academic paper* states in its abstract that Citric acid had the lowest IC50 values for values for α-amylase and α-glucosidase activities 0.64±0.04 μM/mL and 8.95±0.05 μM/mL, respectively, and thus exhibited the strongest antidiabetic effect. Mulberry fruit vinegar containing the highest content of total organic acid (111.02±1.50 mg/mL) showed the strongest digestive enzyme inhibitory impact. A minor quibble.
The first things that I do when getting up in the morning are urinating (not that there's much left after the night time evacuations), measuring blood pressure and taking medication. Today I added another step: drinking a glass of cold water in which I had dissolved a teaspoon of vinegar. I know that the vinegar hack says to drink a glass with a tablespoon of vinegar, but it's also recommended to start with a little vinegar and work one's way up to a full tablespoon. Surprisingly, the taste was quite refreshing - cold water with a 'tang'. Trees grow from acorns.
I was at the health food shop earlier this morning and amongst other things, I bought almond milk instead of oat milk. The former has 22 calories / 100 ml whereas the latter has 54 calories / 100 ml. I drink about 3 litres of 'milk' a week, meaning that I will save approximately 960 calories a week. This is the equivalent of one full meal: not much, but better than nothing. It all adds up. The almond milk has about 67 mg/100ml potassium whereas oat milk has 389 mg/100ml! It seems that the decision to drink oat milk was taken when I was not in my right mind - it would have been better to drink real milk!
The final hack that I am going to put into practice immediately is taking a post-prandial walk: if we contract our muscles as the glucose moves from our intestine to our bloodstream, our mitochondria have a higher burning capacity. They aren’t overwhelmed as quickly—they are thrilled to use the extra glucose to make ATP to fuel our working muscles. In other words, walking after eating lowers the glycemic index of whatever one has eaten.
Final words from author Jessie Inchauspé: Now you know the amazing combo for snacking on something sweet without incurring a big glucose spike in your body: vinegar before, exercise after.
(*) Noh, Y. H., Lee, D. B., Lee, Y. W. and Pyo, Y. H. (2020): "In Vitro Inhibitory Effects of Organic Acids Identified in Commercial Vinegars on α-Amylase and α-Glucosidase", Preventive Nutrition and Food Science, 25(3), p.319.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 251 | Another month comes to an end | MBA, Business novel, Steeleye Span, Eliyahu Goldratt | |
| 1037 | The music room (2) | Musical instruments | |
| 1229 | My life in ruins | Films, Athens, Greece |
