apple-cider vinegar, baby

I wondered whether it was online quackery, but I decided to try consuming a bit of apple-cider vinegar every day. Different sites and videos recommend different amounts of vinegar, and none of the sites I looked at, even the ones supposedly run by doctors, took body size into consideration when discussing dosage. So that was a red flag, but otherwise, most of the sites and videos seemed to overlap in describing apple-cider vinegar, a.k.a. "ACV," as a way to fight bacteria and lower blood sugar. That's what caught my attention, so over the past ten days or so, I began, uh, dosing. I've been consuming ACV at a dose of about two tablespoons per day, usually before or after meals. I have some bottles of Korean double-strength filtered ACV; some sites say it's better to buy the unfiltered kind, but I went with what I had. A few sites said that the effects of consuming ACV would manifest fairly quickly, and since I knew I'd be seeing my doctor this morning, I started quaffing the sour substance ten or so days ago.

Result: very intriguing, bordering on wow. Normally, when I see the doc, I'll have a finger-prick blood-sugar reading done, and those numbers will be between 150 and 160—high for non-diabetics, but not bad for diabetics. Today's reading was the lowest I've ever seen: 143. Of course, I was also low-carbing it this entire week, so that may also have been a factor. (I did, however, break down and grab a handful of carby mixed nuts on Monday, and I had myself a handful of chocolate chips about two days ago.) My HbA1c number is still very high at around 8, so the doc slapped another set of meds on me. I hadn't been exercising much the last time I saw the doc; I've been much more active over the past two months, what with creek-walking and my near-nightly climb up 14 floors' worth of stairs.

I do think the ACV brought something to the table, though: I've gone low-carb in advance of doctor's visits before, and my blood-sugar numbers have never registered as low as 143. So I'm going to continue the ACV regimen, even though Wikipedia warns that increasing your blood's acidity can lead to kidney trouble if you're not careful. The difference between the finger-prick test and the HbA1c test is that the latter is supposed to give an average number that covers 2-3 months. I've done ACV for only ten days, so that wouldn't have been enough to affect my HbA1c reading. I'll keep at it for a while—at least until my kidneys start to hurt.