Vinegar.  If there’s a more all-purpose food on the market today, you’ll have to let me know of one.  From scrubbing the floor to shining silverware, deodorizing the den to conditioning the follicles, removing carpet stains to removing bumper stickers, vinegar rivals duct tape in its ubiquity of usage.

Unlike duct tape, though, vinegar is something we should all be consuming.  For whatever reason, though, vinegar is a lone reed.  The bottle sits by its lonely self, collecting dust in our food pantries and cupboards for months on end.

It’s time to put the vim and vigor back into vinegar, as the health benefits of vinegar are truly off the charts!

Now, there are lots of claims out there that vinegar is so beneficial to health, that it can even treat diabetes, prevent cancer, forestall the aging process, and lower cholesterol.  Frankly, there aren’t a whole lot of studies out there supporting these claims, but there are a number of them that support its ability to fight fat.

One such study was conducted in 2005, where researchers from the Swedish institute of higher learning, Lund University, found that people who began putting more vinegar into their meals throughout the day lost weight, even after meals where sugar levels spike, which tricks the brain into believing the body is still hungry.  In essence, vinegar reduced cravings.

The latest study on vinegar’s role in weight loss hails from Japan, and is published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.  It involved dosing three groups of rats with varying amounts of vinegar to go along with their high fat diets (50 percent of the calories they consumed was fat).  What they found was that the group that was fed the highest dosage of vinegar produced the least amount of fat, and actually saw reductions in their fat mass by about 10 percent.

Remember, all of the groups were fed the exact same diets, yet the ones that had the vinegar saw fat loss.

Researchers believe vinegar’s role in rolling back “rolls” has something to do with how vinegar reacts with the liver, where fatty acids are oxidized to be used as storage or as energy.  The acetic acid in vinegar appears to minimize the buildup of fatty acids when they’re oxidized.

Of course, more studies need to be done to further assess vinegar’s role in weight loss for people, but the results are promising.  After all, it’s well established that vinegar improves digestion and is one of the ways in which our body can better absorb key nutrients that assist in weight loss, like calcium.

The question remains, though:  How best to incorporate vinegar into our diet?

Well, you could just drink a shot of apple cider a day, but that’s probably not the most appetizing of ways (though it would sure tantalize those taste buds).

Besides the obvious ways, like as an alternative to dressing on salads or steamed vegetables, here are some other outside-the-box (or should I say, “bottle”) uses for vinegar in meals:

• Instead of marinating cabbage for coleslaw in mayonnaise, use vinegar as a marinade.  It’s a low-calorie, tart alternative to the traditional coleslaw.
  
  
• Use vinegar as a dipping sauce for sushi instead of high sodium soy sauces.
  
  
• Many people use vinegar when serving beans.  By drizzling vinegar on beans right before they’re done cooking, it gives the beans a salty flavor, sans the sodium.
  
  
• A great summertime treat is lightly coating ice cold sliced cucumbers with apple cider vinegar.  Splash some fresh ground pepper and unrefined sea salt on the cukes to really dial up the flavor.

Be imaginative.  Vinegar is something you should be putting into your diet each and every day.  It doesn’t have to be much; even a tablespoon will do fine when you dine with vinegar.  I personally use Bragg's Organic Apple Cider Vinegar.