I know you work hard to make the best lifestyle choices so you can improve your health destiny and longevity

and there's lots of information out there on how to do just that. So where do you start?

Well, we start with the facts. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

My job is to bring you the latest peer-reviewed nutrition and health research and share it with you here.

I know what you're thinking. Vinegar, that stuff you hide in the back of your kitchen cabinet, in our first story,

we look at how daily vinegar consumption can lead to a significant loss of abdominal fat.

Vinegar has evidently been used as a weight loss aid from nearly 200 years, but does it work?

Well, like hot sauce, it can be a nearly calorie free way to flavor foods and this also is a tasty, exotic vinegar is out there now like fig, peach, and pomegranate that's used from.

But the question is, is there something special about vinegar that helps with weight loss?

Vinegar is defined simply as a dilute solution of acetic acid, which takes energy for our body to metabolize, activating an enzyme called AMPK,

which is like our body's fuel gauge. If it senses that we're low, it amps up energy production, tells the body to stop storing fat and start burning fat.

And so given our obesity epidemic, it's crucial that oral compounds with high bioavailability are developed to safely induce chronic AMPK enzyme activation, which would potentially be beneficial for long term weight loss.

No need to develop such a compound though, if you can buy it at any grocery store.

We know vinegar can activate AMPK in human cells, but as the dose one might get sprinkling on a salad enough, if you take endothelial cells, blood vessel lining cells from a bill who chords after babies are born, and expose them to various levels of acetate, which is what the acetic acid and vinegar turns into in our stomach.

It appears to take concentration in at least 100 to get a really significant boost in AMPK.

So how much acetate do you get in your bloodstream sprinkling about a tablespoon of vinegar on your salad? You do it 100, but only for about 15 minutes.

And even at that concentration, 10 or 20 minutes exposure doesn't seem to do much. Now granted this in a petri dish, but we didn't have any clinical studies until we did.

Double blind trial investigating the effects of vinegar intake on reduction of body fat and overweight men and women. Now they call them obese, but they were actually slimmer than your average American. In Japan, they call anything over a BMI of 25 obese, because the average American adult is about 28.6.

But anyway, they took about 150 overweight individuals and randomly split them into one of three groups, a high dose vinegar group, where they drank a beverage containing two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar a day, a low dose group, where they drank a beverage containing only one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar a day, and a placebo control group, where they had them drink an acidic beverage they developed to taste the same as the vinegar drink, but using a different kind of acid, so there's no acetic acid.

No other changes in their diet or exercise, in fact, they monitored their diets and gave them all pedometer, so make sure that the only significant difference between three groups was the amount of vinegar they were getting every day.

And within just one month, this is the significant drops in weight, and both vinegar groups compared to placebo, with higher dose, doing better than the low dose, which just got better, and better, month after month.

In fact, by month three, the do nothing placebo group actually gained weight, as overweight people tend to do, whereas the vinegar group significantly dropped their weight.

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