Does apple cider vinegar lower blood sugar?
A little. When researchers pooled the trials, vinegar taken with a meal made the rise in blood sugar after eating smaller, but the trials disagreed with each other and the effect was modest. A 10-minute walk after the meal has stronger evidence and costs nothing.
What we’d do
If you like vinegar, put it on a salad and eat the salad before the carbs. That gets you the vinegar and the food order in one move. Don’t take shots of it, and don’t count on it to fix a meal. The walk after dinner and the order of your plate do more.
Why it caught on
Apple cider vinegar is cheap, it’s in every kitchen, and a spoonful before a plate of pasta sounds like an easy fix. The trials say it does something, and the real question is how much.
What the trials found
A 2017 review pooled controlled trials where people had vinegar with a meal and compared their blood sugar afterward with a meal without it. The researchers started the review because single trials had come out in conflicting directions.
Pooled together, vinegar lowered the total rise in blood sugar after the meal, and it lowered the insulin response too. In statistics terms the glucose effect was a standardized difference of −0.60, with a wide range from −1.08 to −0.11. That’s a real effect on average, somewhere between small and large depending on the trial. The range is that wide because the trials disagreed. The trials were short, mostly single meals, and they didn’t test whether vinegar changes A1c or diabetes risk.
How it compares
| What you add to a meal | What it did | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Vinegar with the meal | a smaller rise on average, varied a lot between trials | pooled single-meal trials, 2017 |
| Protein and vegetables first, carbs 10 minutes later | peak more than 40% lower | 15 adults with prediabetes, one meal |
| A 10-minute walk after each meal | rise 12% smaller than one daily walk, 22% after dinner | 41 adults with type 2, two weeks each |
Each of these measured something different, so the numbers can’t be lined up exactly or added together. The walk was tested over two weeks of normal life, and the other two over single meals.
Vinegar is like a coupon at the checkout. It takes a bit off the bill, sometimes more and sometimes less, but it won’t pay for the meal.
Vinegar already in the food
The food-order trial’s salad had a balsamic dressing, and its authors noted that the vinegar might have nudged the results a little. If you use vinegar at all, a vinaigrette on the salad you eat first is the easy way.
Vinegar is an acid, so drink it diluted if you take it at all. See does eating carbs last lower blood sugar? and does walking after eating lower blood sugar? for the two moves with stronger evidence, and try both on a plate in Flatten the hill.
4 sources
- Shishehbor F, Mansoori A and Shirani F, Vinegar consumption can attenuate postprandial glucose and insulin responses: a systematic review and meta-analysis of clinical trials, Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, 2017pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Reynolds AN and others, Advice to walk after meals is more effective for lowering postprandial glycaemia in type 2 diabetes than advice that does not specify timing, Diabetologia, 2016pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Shukla AP and others, The impact of food order on postprandial glycaemic excursions in prediabetes, Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 2019pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Shukla AP and others, full text of the same studypmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
