The health benefits of apple cider vinegar

 Discover the numerous health benefits of apple cider vinegar...

Apple cider vinegar: a store cupboard staple and folklore favourite cure-all. We’re shining a spotlight on the health benefits of apple cider vinegar, before revealing the best ways to incorporate this powerhouse ingredient into your diet…

What is apple cider vinegar?

 

Apple cider vinegar is a type of vinegar which is created by adding yeast to the juice of crushed apples. This causes the sugar in the apple juice to ferment and turn into alcohol, which bacteria then convert into acetic acid. It’s this acid that gives apple cider vinegar that well-known sourness and tang.

 

History of apple cider vinegar

A simple apple cider vinegar has become a bit of a trend as people become more clued up on its benefits for internal health. But, as an essential ingredient, it’s nothing new.

In Ancient Greek, physician Hippocrates prescribed apple cider vinegar and honey for coughs and colds. Plus, the Romans swore by it as an energising tonic. The probiotic content would have improved their stomachs’ gut flora and ability to take in more nutrients, as well as remove waste toxins.

Fast-forward to the modern day, and researchers are investigating new medical usages for this age-old vinegar. Hiccupops, an apple cider vinegar lolly invented to cure hiccups, is the subject of trials by US research institutions.

Certain cancer, liver and epilepsy treatments cause hiccups, which can be painful to the patient. This lolly overstimulates the nerve associated with the hiccup reflex and stops it firing.

Health benefits of apple cider vinegar

Discover some of the key health benefits of apple cider vinegar…

Apple cider vinegar for weight management

According to a Japanese study, apple cider vinegar also aids healthy weight loss. In a 12-week trial, participants who drank 15ml or 30ml of apple cider vinegar daily lost up to 2lb more than those drinking a placebo.

The high acetic acid levels work as an inhibitor to lipogenesis, the process in which sugar is converted to fatty acids in the body.

Apple cider vinegar for heart health

Apple cider vinegar can also reduce the risk of heart disease. In 2011, scientists gave daily doses to test subjects and proved it significantly decreased LDL (low density lipoprotein), aka bad cholesterol.

This is due to the high levels of polyphenols, particularly chlorogenic acid, which is found in high quantities in the vinegar. Polyphenols are micronutrients that help to stop the oxidisation of LDL, which means clearer, healthier arteries.

How to take apple cider vinegar

Apple cider vinegar is a hugely diverse ingredient, which you can use in a range of different recipes. If you’re purely going for the health benefits, simply mix 15ml of apple cider vinegar with 300ml of water or herbal tea and drink each morning.

If you fancy incorporating apple cider vinegar into your cooking, try out the following recipes…

 

 

Green apple cider vinegar smoothie

Add some tang to a smoothie by whizzing up 2 tsp of detoxifying apple cider vinegar with a green apple, kiwi, half a cucumber and a handful of kale.

BBQ apple cider vinegar marinade

Marinate summer barbecue meat or veg with apple cider vinegar to create a barrier between the food and flames, which stops carcinogenic heterocyclic amines (HCA) forming.

Combine ½ cup apple cider vinegar with 3 tbsp soy sauce, 3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, cracked black pepper, 3 crushed and chopped garlic cloves and a sprig of thyme.

Buttermilk with apple cider vinegar

When you use apple cider vinegar to make buttermilk, it acts as a natural probiotic ingredient for pancakes, scones or bread. Make your own by adding 1 tbsp of vinegar to 230ml milk. Let it stand for 15 mins, then use straight away in your chosen recipe.

3 best organic apple cider vinegars

When buying apple cider vinegar, it’s best to choose one that is unpasteurised and unfiltered. An easy way to spot this is to look out for cloudiness.

What is apple cider vinegar with ‘the mother’?

 

An unpasteurised and unfiltered apple cider vinegar will contain ‘the mother’: a cloudy substance that is full of highly nutritious gut-friendly bacteria and powerful enzymes. If you find a bottle that is totally clear, chances are this goodness has been filtered out.

Begin your apple cider vinegar journey with these high-quality, unpasteurised, unfiltered organic options…

Aspall Raw Organic Apple Cyder Vinegar

The raw and organic apple cider vinegar from Aspall is fermented from the juice of a special blend of organic apples. It is also unfiltered to retain the natural living ‘mother’ organisms that develop during fermentation. Aspall also creates a filtered option, but this raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar offers the greatest health benefits.

Ostler’s Cider Vinegar with ‘The Mother’

This award-winning organic cider vinegar is made using freshly crushed apples which have been allowed to mature. The vinegar has not been pasteurised or filtered, meaning it is complete with the nutritious ‘mother’ culture.

Higher Nature Organic Apple Cider Vinegar

Manufactured from organically grown apples from organic certified and inspected orchards, this apple cider vinegar is unfiltered, unpasteurised and naturally fermented to retain the highly nutritious bacterial culture of the ‘mother’.
How to make apple cider vinegar

Did you know, you can also easily make your own apple cider vinegar at home? Follow these step-by-step instructions and start reaping the health benefits…

1. Core, peel and roughly chop three apples.
2. Put them in a sterilised bowl or jar, then mix in 3 tsp brown sugar, and water to cover.
3. Place a paper towel on top and secure with a band.
4. Leave for 2-3 weeks in a warm, dark place, then strain and return to the jar for another few weeks. Taste occasionally until it’s reached the level of acidity you like.

 

Hardship and the mind-body connection: the effects of low resilience

 What does it mean to be resilient?

The answer will be different for everyone. We each have our own experiences and overcome challenges unique to our lives. No one walks through life hoping to lose their jobs, have a life-threatening illness, or live through the COVID-19 pandemic.

But, when adversity strikes, we find a way through it.

 

Perhaps you’re currently going through something difficult right now. It may have slashed your confidence, leaving you uncertain about the future. But you’re more than capable of resilience. Humans didn’t survive thousands of years by being non-adaptable. You carry those skills within you — you just have to let them shine.

If you don’t, you put yourself at risk of serious health consequences. Mental and physical health are intimately linked, and letting adversity get to you can cause everything from depressive symptoms to heartburn.

It’s important to understand the mind-body connection and how it plays into the effects of low resilience. Once you do, we can work together to find a path forward. You can build resilience.

How does resilience affect a person’s life?

Resilience is a combination of protective factors, including your ability to withstand, overcome, and bounce back from difficult life events.

This doesn’t mean stressful situations won’t affect you — quite the contrary. You’ll still feel all the negative emotions and types of stress. But, with more resilience, you can work through those feelings and avoid psychological distress.

The 4 types of resilience

There are four types of resilience, each corresponding to a different area of your life.

Psychological resilience is the ability to motivate yourself to do something difficult. For example:

§  Running every day to train for a half-marathon

§  Writing a whole book while also working a full-time job

Emotional resilience refers to your ability to conjure positive emotions when you need them — like optimism, curiosity, or joy. Some examples:

§  Encouraging your colleagues through a difficult project

§  Making the best of your recovery time after an injury

Social resilience is the ability to reach out to others for help. It’s also about being the kind of person who others don’t mind supporting. Some examples of social resilience include:

§  Asking friends for encouragement before you head into a job interview

§  Considering and accepting difficult advice from people who care about you

Physical resilience refers to the capacity to overcome physical challenges. For instance:

§  Beating your weight-lifting goal at the gym

§  Helping a friend move a couch down a narrow staircase

Why resilience is important

Life has many blessings. But you’ll never completely avoid hardship. Some challenges will be relatively minor, and others may be disastrous.

When adversity strikes, keeping a resilient mindset allows you to tackle problems head-on, overcome them, and move on. It prevents you from becoming overwhelmed and encourages healthy coping mechanisms. It also helps you tap into your strengths and support networks to rebuild after experiencing pain, hardship, and suffering.

What causes low resilience?

There are a few reasons why people have low resilience. Thankfully, low resilience doesn't have to be a permanent condition. With regular practice of mental fitness exercises, you can build resilience and other core psychological resources, just like you go to the gym to build strength and physical fitness.

 

Here are things that might be affecting your resilience levels:

Childhood experiences. Being consistently overwhelmed as a child and lacking a strong support system are good predictors for unhealthy coping strategies and a low tolerance for change.

Lack of social support. Even if you had a healthy childhood, you might feel overwhelmed if you don’t currently receive emotional validation from loved ones. Your family members, friends, and colleagues should help you feel supported.

Unrealistic plans. Setting unachievable goals can set you up for failure and disappointment. Lower resilience often stems from taking on too much too fast and setting yourself up for failure.

Low self-esteem. If you don’t have faith in yourself or your abilities, you’re less likely to adapt gracefully to stressful situations. Some side-effects of low self-esteem also include mental illnesses such as anxiety, stress, loneliness, and an increased likelihood of depression.

Emotional regulation. If you never learned how to process your emotions or seek help to work through them, you’re more likely to be overwhelmed when challenged.

The impacts of low resilience

Low resilience often leads to higher levels of stress, which is why both conditions share similar symptoms. These include behavioral changes like:

§  Changing your eating habits

§  Smoking, drinking, or other substances

§  Avoiding colleagues, friends, and family

§  Overreacting to minor problems

§  You may also experience emotional symptoms in reaction to adverse events. For example:

 

ü  Irritability ü  Mood swings ü  Anxiety ü  Disappointment with yourself

ü  Tearfulness or aggression ü  Lack of motivation ü  Low energy levels

 

§  From a physical standpoint, you may experience:

 

ü  Fatigue ü  Nausea

ü  Muscle pains and aching ü  Palpitations

 

§  Your cognitive functions may also take a hit, leading to:

 The effects of low resilience on your health

Low resilience increases your susceptibility to stress. This, in turn, can lead to long-term health consequences.

 

Stress is your body’s reaction to a real or perceived danger (also known as a stressor). When you have low resilience, your response to a stressor is more intense — causing the release of stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, through your body.

These hormones increase your heart rate, tighten your blood vessels, and raise your blood sugar. If you frequently experience these symptoms — or experience them for an extended period of time — you open yourself up to several unfavorable health conditions. Here are some examples:

ü  Mental exhaustion ü  A lowered immune system ü  Heart disease and cardiovascular problems ü  High blood pressure

ü  Diabetes ü  Burnout ü  Weight gain ü  Cognitive impairment

High resilience helps with stress management. It reduces your reaction to stressors, thus lowering your stress response and risk of long-term health consequences.

Consequences of low personal resilience at work

Unsurprisingly, 75% of American workers say “stress” is their number one workplace health concern. And for those who lack resilience, stress can seriously reduce their sense of worth, attitude toward their job, and work performance. And let’s be real: work can be stressful.

But it doesn’t have to be, so it’s important to increase your level of resilience at work. It’ll improve your well-being and make you a more valuable candidate to prospective employers.

Some of the top skills valued by companies are related to resilience. They want people who are adept at:

§  Complex problem solving

§  Creativity and innovation

§  Emotional intelligence

§  Cognitive flexibility

§  Self-efficacy

These skills can help you adapt to complex challenges, work more collaboratively with your team, and ultimately reduce the impact of stress on your well-being.

Reframing negative thoughts 

Humans naturally tend toward negativity. We often:

§  Remember traumatic events more clearly than positive ones

§  Dwell on criticism rather than praise

§  Think about negative things more often than positive ones

§  React more strongly to negative events than hopeful ones

You can thank evolution for this cognitive function. Historically, it kept us alert to potential dangers and increased our chances of survival. But nowadays, our negativity bias is much less helpful. It can hurt you in many areas, including your resilience.

When you focus on something bad that happened, the chances are that it wasn’t a life-or-death situation. The unfair criticism you received at work, the rude customer at the coffee shop, the spilled water on your shirt — these are valid annoyances, but they won’t kill you. Even if it feels like the end of the world, you can persevere.

Dwelling on these negative events gives them undue weight in your life. This only increases your stress levels when reframing your thoughts would be much healthier.

You can do this in a few ways:

Avoid all-or-nothing thinking. Be careful not to see everything as a strict success or failure. For example, spilling water is indeed annoying. But it shouldn’t have a bearing on the rest of your day.

Look for the positive. It might sound cliché, but disregarding positive experiences only justifies hurtful thought patterns.

Look for positive things that happened to you. There are more than you think.

Tame your emotions. You’re allowed to be annoyed, angry, or sad. But don’t draw conclusions about your life based on these emotions. Like most feelings, they drift away as quickly as they came.

Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s easy to make assumptions, but you likely don’t have the details to accurately assess the situation. So next time someone cuts you off on the highway, try to think of the whole picture. Their anger has more to do with their issues than yours.

Practice self-compassion. Negative thoughts harm no one more than you. You can acknowledge a bad day while also letting it go. Removing negativity from your mind is an act of self-care.

Focus on what you can control. The world is full of things you can’t change, so it’s no use dwelling on them. Instead, focus on what you can change. This will help you feel more empowered and optimistic — thus improving your resilience.

The road to resilience

You’ll invariably encounter hard times. It’s a part of life. But, by building resilience, you can gracefully take on the challenges that come your way.

It won’t be easy, and it’s okay to ask for help if you need it. Working with a mental health professional can help you identify negative thought patterns and stop the effects of low resilience — especially if your negativity is rooted in childhood trauma.

 

You Are Stronger Than You Think

Imagine that you magically wake up tomorrow as a stronger and more resilient version of yourself. How would you live differently? What would you do if you knew that you would eventually recover from failures or setbacks?

Would you take more chances? Finally finish that project or make that call or have that conversation?

What opportunities have you been putting off or passing up because you don’t think you’re strong enough to deal with the rejection or disappointment?

What if I told you that you are probably stronger than you think you are?

How can I know that? Because most of us are stronger than we think.

There are a lot of ways we overestimate ourselves: We tend to think we are smarter and healthier and better drivers than we probably are. But there are also ways we underestimate ourselves. And one thing we tend to underestimate is our ability to cope with negative events. We often predict that we will feel worse and for a longer period of time than we actually end up feeling. We can’t imagine ever getting over a breakup or job loss or the death of a loved one.

But, our emotional responses are often less intense than we imagine they will be, even for really bad situations, like losing a loved one.

Why you’re stronger than you think

Our brains are wired to try to minimise the impact of negative events. According to University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson, one way our brains do this is by trying to make sense of negative events. We might do this by rationalising or re-interpreting events in a way that makes them seem more predictable and inevitable. We tell ourselves that “we knew all along” that things would happen the way they did. When events seem more predictable and less novel, it reduces their emotional power.

Here is how Wilson describes our sense-making processes in his book Strangers to Ourselves: “Just as we have a physiological immune system that identifies dangerous foreign bodies and minimises their impact, so do we have a psychological immune system that identifies threats to our self-esteem and finds ways of neutralising these threats.”

So, if we’re really that good at making ourselves feel better about negative events, why are we so bad at predicting that response? Why do we think we’ll feel so bad for so long? Why do we underestimate our own resiliency?

One reason is that our psychological immune system that helps us deal with negative events often works outside of our awareness. Since we’re not aware of how our brains work to help us make sense of and adapt to negative events, we underestimate our ability to do so.

Another reason we have a hard time predicting how we’ll respond to negative events is that when we think about a negative event, we often think about it in a vacuum. We think only about that one event and how it will make us feel.

We might be right that we’ll feel bad if we don’t get a promotion, but we probably won’t feel as bad for as long as we think we will, because not getting the promotion is not the only thing that will affect how we will feel. We have a million other things going on in our lives that will affect our well-being. We find out we didn’t get the promotion, but then we go home and eat dinner and go to our kid’s soccer game and meet a friend for lunch. And all of these things will also impact how we feel.

But if we focus too narrowly on the things that will change as a result of a negative event and not enough on all the things that will stay the same in our lives, we will predict that we will be a lot more adversely affected by negative events than we probably will be. We will forget that life usually does go on.

How are you going to use your strength and resilience? You have a hidden superpower. And it’s not magic. You really are stronger than you think you are! It's up to you to decide how you are going to use your superpower!