Apples are healthy fruits that you can eat any time of the day. If you find yourself too lazy to bring around apples then a good substitute for that is apple juice. There is also a less popular form of apple that you can easily bring around all day, which is apple cider vinegar. There are plenty of apple cider vinegar health benefits that most people just don’t know about.
Apple cider vinegar, or ACV for short, is not the same as apple juice. Apple juice is made by crushing the pulp into tiny pieces and usually served without any filtering. However, to make apple cider vinegar, you need to get it into cider form first. The apples are cut into pieces and placed inside a filter container. The contents are then pressed and the juices are extracted out while leaving the pulp behind. After that, yeast and bacteria are added so the apple juice would ferment and turn the sugar into alcohol. Then this alcoholic apple cider goes through another fermentation process which turns the alcohol into vinegar.
The process can be rather tedious just to process apple cider but people don’t do without getting any benefits to your health. The process of turning to the apple cider into vinegar changes the way it reacts to your body. Mother of vinegar or Mycoderma aceti plays an important part in when it comes to apple cider vinegar benefits. This mother of vinegar is what gives the apple vinegar its murky and cobweb look and can be seen settling at the bottom of the bottle. Drinking clear vinegar will not give you the same benefits of apple cider vinegar because the liquid content will be filtered out and that includes the mother of vinegar.
This apple vinegar can be used in a lot of ways. You can drink it in its liquid form so your body can absorb its nutrients directly or you can apply it on specific areas on your body like face or hair. Different ways of applying this vinegar gives you different effects as you will find out in a while.
One of the biggest benefits of apple cider vinegar is helping you to lose weight when you go on a apple cider vinegar diet. The ACV has a special property where it helps to break down fat so it can be used by the body immediately. Normally, the fat will just be kept by the body to be used later – something which you should already know what the end result is. This weight loss result is similar to eating complex carbohydrates. Rather than letting the body takes time and energy to break down a complex protein, it lets the body burn the current fat content first. A lot of dieting plans would recommend dieters to take up apple cider vinegar diet if they can stand the taste of the vinegar.
The easiest way to incorporate apple cider vinegar benefits into your apple cider vinegar weight loss plan is to dilute two to three tablespoons into a cup of water and drink it. The water will help to dilute up the acidic content and make it less sour. You can also add in some honey if you still don’t like the taste of your apple cider vinegar weight loss drink. Drink it three times a day and you will meet your daily dosage. Another method of consuming ACV is to turn it into a dressing. Some people will just dress their salad with apple vinegar while others pour it over their meals. It all depends on how much of that vinegar taste people can tolerate.
So far the methods listed above is for consuming braggs apple cider vinegar. Other than weight loss, apple cider vinegar cures heartburn, lowers your blood pressure and might even help with arthritis problems. Another way to use braggs apple cider vinegar is to apply it externally on different parts of the body.
ACV is a cheap treatment to acne problems. You just need to mix ACV in with water to turn it into an apple cider vinegar acne solution and apply it over your acne areas. Let the apple cider vinegar acne mixture to dry out and you are done. You do not need to apply anything else after that. After a few days you will notice that the amount of acne will start to reduce. However, there are a few drawbacks of using ACV as your acne treatment. People usually recommend a 50% ACV and 50% water solution but it will not work on everyone. Some will feel a sting when using that formula and will have to dilute it further. Another problem people will face is the smell of the ACV. It will go away after your face has dried up but it will come back again when you start to sweat. What you can do to avoid that is to apply the ACV solution before you sleep and wash it off in the morning.
ACV can also help to treat other skin problem like athlete’s foot and skin burn. To treat athlete’s foot, just dab your entire foot with cotton balls that are soaked in ACV. Then let it dry out before putting on your socks and shoe. For skin burn, put a damp cloth with diluted ACV over the affected area and let it rest.
ACV can also be used on your hair to control dandruff and make your hair smoother. The acidity of apple cider vinegar hair solution is closer to the natural pH of your scalp so it is safe to apply it directly. The natural attributes of apple cider vinegar hair mixture will kill harmful germs and also acts as a conditioner. Applying ACV will also help to close the opened, split or damaged hair cuticles thus making your hair smoother and shinier. If you are worried about the smell of ACV, far not as it will be gone the moment you rinse it off and let it dry.
As much as you enjoy apple cider vinegar health benefits, there are some side effects that you need to watch out yourself. The vinegar is also more concentrated and more acidic. It is not a type of drink where you can have 1 liter of it daily without any side effects. Just a few tablespoon of this vinegar is the recommended daily dosage for most people. Drinking undiluted ACV can weaken the teeth’s enamel if you do not wash it down with water. There is tablets form of ACV but one of the pills gets stuck in your throat, it can cause a minor acid burn.