ex150vinegar review: lost 4-6lbs, but nothing crazy

Subjectively much less appetite, but doesn't seem magic

“Save me, vinegar!” he shouted. The vinegar looked down and whispered “No.”

I just finished 30 days of ex150vinegar - my usual ex150 heavy cream diet with added vinegar.

Why add vinegar?

I recently stumbled across the blog of Jaromir Janda, mct4health. He has been touting the virtues of vinegar, or more specifically, acetate. Vinegar is typically 5-6% acetic acid, which contains acetate.

Jaromir has found some very interesting studies on vinegar, or acetate in general. His blog is fascinating and I binged it, reading for an entire weekend. I highly recommend you check it out.

In mice, feeding vinegar can not only prevent the onset of diabetes & obesity in mice, it can actually reverse it.

But even more impressively, there are actually several RCTs in human subjects, living in the wild, that show very successful vinegar interventions - RCTs in hundreds of people, from different countries, from different decades.

Let’s briefly look at these studies.

Vinegar Science

This 2019 literature review of the role of acetate in body weight control and sensitivity is a great start. Here are some key points from it and from Jaromir’s blog:

• Acetic acid is a 2-carbon saturated fatty acid (C2:0), one of the so-called Short-Chained Fatty Acids (SCFAs). An acetate is a salt formed by it with any base, e.g. sodium acetate or potassium acetate.

• Among other SCFAs like butyrate (C4:0), acetate is produced by certain gut bacteria from e.g. fiber.

• It is thought that this is one of the effects by which fiber can have a beneficial effect on metabolism.

• Jaromir hypothesizes that adipocytes (fat cells) can get into an overgrown state known as “senescence” in which they can no longer fulfill their functions and start leaking fatty acids. They also send an emergency signal to warn surrounding cells of their misfortune.

• What causes adipocytes to go into the senescent state? Among other things, he thinks that an excess of omega-6 PUFA linoleic acid, rapid overfeeding, or fructose can start off the process.

• The idea is that acetate has a unique way of turning these senescent cells back to their normal, functional state. For example, supplementing apple cider vinegar powder can reverse liver damage in mice.

But what about those RCTs I mentioned?

This astonished me the most. The effects of vinegar start off relatively quickly. It’s not like seed oils, where you might have to run an experiment for years at a time. It’s more like the protein restriction trials, where the benefits of protein restriction kick in nearly immediately, or at least within weeks.

There are several RCTs that lasted only 12 weeks and had very impressive results. Let’s go through them.

Japan

The first one is from Japan, 2009: Vinegar Intake Reduces Body Weight, Body Fat Mass, and Serum Triglyceride Levels in Obese Japanese Subjects

175 obese Japanese people were randomly assigned to one of 3 groups. Daily, they ingested 500ml of a beverage containing either 15ml apple vinegar (750mg acetic acid), 30ml vinegar (1,500mg AA), or 0ml vinegar (placebo). The experiment lasted 12 weeks. They drank 250ml of the beverage after breakfast, and 250ml after dinner.

Starting from week 4, the vinegar drinking subjects began losing fat and waist circumference in a dose-dependent manner. The placebo group gained a slight amount of fat. Serum triglyceride levels also improved in the vinegar groups.

Not bad! 175 people is actually a pretty decent study size. It’s also interesting that the effect appears to have been dose-dependent, meaning more vinegar moar better. Interestingly, the subjects here were told not to change their diet or exercise. They just added 15 or 30ml vinegar daily and saw significant fat loss and other metabolic improvements.

Iran

Explicitly mentioning the earlier Japanese trial, there’s a 2018 RCT from Iran: Beneficial effects of Apple Cider Vinegar on weight management, Visceral Adiposity Index and lipid profile in overweight or obese subjects receiving restricted calorie diet: A randomized clinical trial

39 participants were put into 2 groups. Both groups had a calorie restricted diet with a 250kcal/day deficit, but one group ingested 30ml of apple cider vinegar daily. The trial ran for 12 weeks. After 12 weeks, the ACV group had lost significantly more fat.

Lebanon

Maybe also inspired by the Japanese trial, here’s a 2024 RCT from Lebanon: Apple cider vinegar for weight management in Lebanese adolescents and young adults with overweight and obesity: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study

120 overweight or obese Lebanese people between 12 and 25 years were put into 5, 10, or 15ml of apple cider vinegar groups or a placebo group for 12 weeks. The ACV contained 5% acetic acid and was taken, diluted in 250ml of water, every morning on an empty stomach. The ACV groups achieved significant reduction in body weight in a dose dependent manner, losing 5-7kg over the course of 12 weeks. They also had slightly lower serum glucose, cholesterol, and triglycerides.

I took the liberty to graph the results on their weight:

Y-axis is weight in kg. I didn’t make error bars because I don’t know how to make error bars in a spreadsheet.

You can see that the results are pretty dramatic. Every vinegar group lost a significant amount of weight. Interestingly, the 15ml group seems to have started at the lowest weight, and started losing faster, but then the other groups mostly caught up.

The first 2 months on the 10 and 15ml of vinegar seem to have been pretty mild, but then it accelerated for those groups, whereas the 15ml group started of faster and is overall more linear.

Hard to say if this is a statistical artifact or if we need a certain amount of “vinegar under the curve” until the effects really kick in?

If you look closely, the 10ml group actually lost more weight in total than the 15ml group. But this could be because they started off at a higher weight? Who knows.

RCT conclusion

It was kind of shocking to me how many RCTs there were on vinegar, and how conclusive they were. None of these have subtle results, the effects are quite large. And this was largely in people in the wild, meaning the scientists couldn’t be quite sure about adherence.

But if you compare these vinegar RCTs to e.g. the studies on GLP-1 agonists, I’d say the vinegar fares much better! Any medication that produced 7kg or 10% weight loss in 12 weeks would be hailed a miracle. Tirzepatide takes over a year to match or beat this, even in the best responding groups. How come nobody is pushing for more apple cider vinegar consumption?

Big Vinegar has clearly lost its marketing edge to Big Pharma. Or maybe there’s not enough money in vinegar.

ex150vinegar protocol

Inspired by all this, I decided to just add vinegar to my regular ex150 diet. I originally aimed at about 10-20g acetic acid, a range Jaromir had extrapolated from mouse studies. This was before I had read the RCTs.

I never achieved 20g in one day, and the 10g only once. At 5%, 10g acetic acid is 200ml of vinegar, and 20g would be 400ml. That’s almost a small or large bottle of vinegar PER DAY, respectively.

In the beginning I just played around with different ways of getting the vinegar in. I tried taking shots from the bottle directly - tasted good and gave me a sort of “flavor hit” that was almost addictive. But I worried about the acid damaging my teeth or esophagus.

I also tried mixing the vinegar with baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to render it ph-neutral and safe to drink. The problem: you end up with sodium acetate, which is, well… a salt. The resulting solution tasted like the nastiest salt water I’d ever seen, and I just couldn’t get it down.

It is also significantly more sodium than e.g. the RDA gives as upper limit for adult men, which is 2.3g/day. The molar weight means you need around 1.4:1 in baking soda to acetic acid, meaning you need 14g of it to neutralize 10g of acetic acid. So you end up with… a very large dose of salt, several grams.

Given that I normally don’t add ANY salt to my food, going to way above the RDA limit (vaguely, not exactly sure how sodium acetate compares to sodium chloride?) is a heck of a difference. I felt all the bad things that I usually get from high sodium intake, including constant thirst and water retention.

The next option was to dilute the vinegar heavily. I used sparkling mineral water for this. For one, the minerals might soften the blow of the acetic acid a little bit, after all, minerals are mostly just salts like the baking soda. Second, I generally find sparkling water easier to drink. I played around with around 50ml vinegar to 500-800ml of sparkling water, for a 10:1 to 16:1 dilution. I’d definitely say higher was better, there was significantly less of a “sting” to the 16:1 mix.

I even drank this mix with a straw, to further protect my teeth. Still, I didn’t exactly love it. At best, it tasted like very sour apple juice.

What I ended up doing most of the time was a sort of “sour bloody mary.” Here’s the recipe:

• 15ml vinegar

• 100ml sparkling mineral water

• 25ml tomato sauce

• 25ml cream

• Hot sauce to taste (Frank’s, Sriracha)

• Stir well and drink with a straw (to protect teeth)

This still ends up with a 15:1 dilution factor, and the vinegar taste is covered up a bit by the tomato and hot sauce. I also think that the cream helps soften the acidity quite a bit. Not sure how, maybe dairy binds it somehow. But it just tasted smoother and had less of a sting.

I took about 3-5 of these “sour bloody mary” shots a day, for 45-75ml vinegar a day. Not even half of my original 200ml goal. But much higher than was used in any of the human RCTs.

For vinegar, I mostly used apple cider vinegar. For one, that’s what all the studies used. Secondly, I tried white wine vinegar and hated it. I don’t like the taste of wine. I also tried balsamic vinegar, which tasted a lot better, maybe even better than the ACV. But ACV was my mainstay.

Acid is Bad for you Mkay

I should put a disclaimer up here: ACID IS REALLY DANGEROUS, EVEN AT 5%.

You can seriously and permanently fuck up your teeth or esophagus with vinegar. Don’t take it from me, look at this 2019 clinical case study from Korea, in which a 15-year old boy drank an insufficiently diluted vinegar beverage daily for a month and got sent to the ER with severe burns of his esophagus:

Corrosive Esophageal Injury due to a Commercial Vinegar Beverage in an Adolescent

A single time of exposure to insufficiently diluted vinegar gave me tingly teeth for the rest of the day. Tingly teeth is not good, it’s a sign that I got way too much acid on there. One time, after drinking insufficiently diluted vinegar with a straw, I got a burning sensation at the back of my throat for a day.

Both of these times I stopped immediately and I also rinsed my mouth out with water every single time I took any vinegar. But still, a single exposure can be enough to hurt for hours or days, in the few seconds before you rinse it out. That brief, initial exposure can do a lot of damage.

PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH VINEGAR.

In the first week or 2, when I was still figuring out how to take the vinegar conveniently and safely, I hurt myself several times. Taking a shot of undiluted vinegar and getting some on my teeth, or just too much vinegar intake in a single day, got me a little bit scared and I scaled down.

That one day I got 200ml of vinegar in, about half of a big bottle, I even got a little bit of nausea besides tingly teeth. On several days, I got mild acid reflux, which I basically never get anymore after quitting seed oils.

Once your tooth enamel is too damaged by acid, it can’t be repaired. I was sort of speculating that this wouldn’t happen during the course of just 30 days, and I think I got out safe, but it sure felt a bit sketchy on those days I went to bed with tingly, sore teeth from a vinegar shot at 10am.

This was really scary because I’ve always had great teeth, and once I had started cutting out seed oils around 2.5 years ago, I had amazing teeth.

I only had a single cavity since childhood, and I suspect the dentist was making it up to sell me more services. There was a stretch of I think over 20 years between my childhood and my late 30s when I never had a single issue with my teeth. No cavities, nothing, until that potentially faux cavity a couple years ago.

So despite all my massive health issues & obesity throughout my life, my teeth where one thing that I never experienced any problems with. Melting my teeth away for a vinegar experiment would be… stupid.

Then again, if you have unhealthy teeth to begin with, pouring vinegar on them is probably even more damaging than on healthy teeth.

Are there safer alternatives to vinegar?

Yes there are. For one, you can buy apple cider vinegar capsules on Amazon:

As you can see, these contain 750mg of acetic acid per 3 capsules. If you really wanted to get 10-20g acetic acid, that’d be 40-80 capsules a day. But then again, nobody in the human RCTs was getting that much, and even I only got that much on a single day.

So you can likely get away with a lot less. Incidentally, 750mg is exactly how much acetic acid is in 15ml 5% vinegar, which is most apple cider vinegar (the balsamic was 6%, not sure if they all are).

That means you could reproduce the 15ml RCT group by taking just 1 serving size of 3 capsules a day. Or you do it twice and you’re part of the 30ml group.

You could also buy sodium acetate, which is the salt resulting when you mix acetic acid with sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). They probably have quite a bit of that in the capsules, actually: when you look at the supplement facts it does say “sodium diacetate.”

Sodium acetate should be totally inert, just disgustingly salty. If you can dilute it to make it palatable, or put it in a pill yourself, or get it down some other way, you should be safe as it is not acidic in any way.

I haven’t found a good source of sodium acetate that is food grade, as most of them seem to be more for lab or industrial applications. If you try one that you find agreeable, let me know. Also how palatable/salty it is lol.

Tale of the tape

Ok, so did it actually work? Let’s take a look at my weight.

You can see my last experiment, the failed 1,500kcal ex_kempner trial, left me at a low of around 231.5lbs. Then followed a small refeed, and I began ex150vinegar.

The refeed weight came off immediately, as is pretty normal on ex150. Within 5 days I had reached the lowest weight I’d seen on ex_kempner - sort of astonishing, given that ex_kempner lasted 6 days and was a drastic restriction in carolies, whereas this was ad-lib heavy cream and some vinegar.

By day 7 I was below the ex_kempner peak, and I’d stay below that number for most of the month except the very end (I’ll get to the end.. at the end).

For the first 2 weeks, it seemed like a spectacular success. I was definitely eating less. I was spontaneously drinking fewer coffees with cream, and I barely ever finished my evening whipped cream. I think I only managed to finish my normal portion twice in the entire month. Often times I wouldn’t even make whipped cream for dinner cause I just wasn’t hungry, or I ate half and left the rest for the following day.

And in the first 2 weeks, I steadily lost weight.

It’s sort of difficult to nail down how much I lost in total. What do I compare it to - the previous low of 231.5lbs on ex_kempner? But that was after 6 days of more than a 50% forced caloric deficit, hardly “normal” conditions.

Or do I compare to the peak of the refeed? But that is artificially higher in water weight than the low-carb, low-protein, low-sodium ex150 diet.

If I take my average low on ex150vinegar compared to the bottom of ex_kempner, I lost 4lbs. If I take halfway between that and the peak of the refeed, it’d be 6lbs.

In any case, it ain’t half bad.

But the magic didn’t last. I couldn’t tell you if it is because I stopped playing around with crazy amounts of vinegar or if it is just a typical month of ex150, with one crazy whoosh and then just a plateau.

But after a little over 2 weeks, I never lost another pound, despite my appetite, subjectively, still being severely suppressed. I didn’t suddenly start eating more cream again.

I went below 228lbs once, then bounced around 228-229lbs for a week, and toward the end, my weight slowly crept up again.

I think that last bit was my increasing use of hot sauce. I eventually had settled on the sour bloody mary delivery vehicle for my vinegar, and kept adding more and more hot sauce to my ~5 shots a day.

Eventually I checked the ingredients and realized I was taking in significant amounts of sodium just from Frank’s RedHot Original sauce and Sriracha.

To put this 4-6lbs weight loss into perspective, that’s pretty similar to what I’d expect on regular ex150. After all, the cream diet brought me down to around 220lbs, where I hovered most of last year.

Only after a few somewhat failed high-carb & other experiments did I go back up to over 230lbs. Last time I did plain ex150, ex150-14, it got me from around 235lbs down to around 230lbs without any vinegar. Until I hit 220lbs, I wouldn’t find it surprising to lose 3-5lbs a month on ex150.

I’m therefore not sure the vinegar really helped, but it might have. Maybe it would’ve only been 2-4lbs without it? Those first 14 days were very linear. Maybe the linear weight loss would’ve continued if I’d continued consuming extreme amounts of vinegar in a safer way, without hurting my teeth?

No Refeed

One interesting bit is that I had zero desire to do any sort of refeed after this trial. Usually I’ll crave something. Maybe cheese, or a steak, or chocolate, or, recently, lentils & beans.

This time, I had zero cravings. I was completely disinterested in any sort of refeed. I don’t know if that’s a good sign, but I think it’s definitely not a bad sign.

I switched straight from ex150vinegar to ex_plainrice, which is just white rice, as the name suggests. No salt, no sauce, only thiamin (B1) supplemented so I don’t get beri beri.

And within 2 days of that, my weight dropped back under 228lbs. I think that’s a pretty good indicator that it was the excess of hot sauce sodium that drove my weight up slightly toward the end of the vinegar trial.

Which still means I plateaued for nearly the second half of the 30 days. If there was vinegar magic in the first 14 days, it was nowhere to be found in the second half.

Notes

I have a ton of notes from this time. I’ll try to compress them into a few representatives per category:

In General

Mostly only access to carrageenan cream this time, sad!
Did 2 days of regular ex150 before starting cause I changed my mind on the vinegar 2 days in haha
Also choline + inositol supplement, btw, although I started this 2 weeks before this experiment (during ex_kempner and before)

Taste

Ok ACV added to tomato slop tastes AMAZING
Taking swigs of ACV from the bottle like an alcoholic lol
Adding vinegar to anything, especially with tomato sauce, makes is super hyperpalatable. Not sure how good that would be for adding to ad-lib food

Satiety

Day 4: First day I got whack-in-the-head cement-truck satiety, dang
Day 5: Finished leftover whipped cream from day before. Pretty low appetite/hunger all day, didn't make dinner cream.

Brutal satiety from whipped cream

Pretty insane cement-truck satiety from whipped cream dinner, barely able to eat 3 spoons

Vinegar Issues

I am consuming staggering amounts of ACV. Halfway through a 500ml bottle in the last 2-3 days.

People on Twitter are telling me the acidity could be bad for my teeth

Decided to no longer put the vinegar into my lunch and only drink through straw, just in case w/ tooth enamel issues

Hm, with straw I actually drink it much slower. Instead of just taking a shot, I'm sipping over 5-15 minutes or so. Maybe that's actually worse in terms of acid exposure? Not sure.

Hm using the straw doesn't actually seem lower in terms of vinegar-teeth exposure lol

Day 12: Feels like I've sort of had less vinegar the last few days for fear of teeth issues

Honestly feels pretty unspectacular, it's just ex150 and a few times a day I make a Sour Bloody Mary

I think I'm consuming less ACV than in the first week. Not sure if I should get on a fixed amount per day instead of ad lib

Some acid reflux after a particularly big dose of vinegar. Usually never have reflux any more.

Teeth feeling kinda sensitive, hm

If you put the straw at the very back of your mouth it works well at avoiding your teeth, but you can still feel the acid burn in your esophagus (even diluted quite a bit)

Got some acid reflux in the evening, maybe an hour after last having vinegar. This is extremely unusual for me

Dang it, just realized drinking 2-3 coke zeros every day might've totally skewed it in terms of teeth/acidity if coke really has the same ph as undiluted vinegar

Spontaneous Activity

Day 7: Went for spontaneous 1.5h walk after a vinegar shot
Day 8: Went for spontaneous 2h walk what is happening
Day 21: Somehow feeling extremely bouncy & energetic today

A few of the more relevant bits:

I also supplemented a “choline + inositol” supplement during this trial, although I started this 2 weeks prior, even before ex_kempner. Could be relevant, but since the effect size of the trial wasn’t much more impressive than regular ex150, I suspect it didn’t do much. I stopped the supplement after the vinegar diet.

Due to lack of good energy drinks while traveling, I temporarily switched to Coke Zero during this experiment. I probably had 2 cans a day on average. Somebody pointed out that Coke has a similar acidity to undiluted vinegar. That sort of doesn’t make sense to me, I’ve had lots of Coke throughout my life and never got acute tingly teeth or acid burn in my esophagus from it. But it could’ve skewed any acidity effects that I attributed to the vinegar, of course.

Just thought I’d point it out.

Conclusion

Did ex150vinegar work? Sure did, I’m now consistently around 228lbs (if I don’t mainline sodium-rich hot sauce) whereas the low on an extreme caloric restriction diet was 231.5lbs before.

Did it work better than regular ex150 would’ve? Not sure. The last round of ex150 was very similar.

I found it interesting that my appetite was, subjectively, much lower, and I consumed much less cream than usual - yet didn’t lose spectacularly more weight, if it was more at all.

What’s next?

Given that the people in the human vinegar RCTs saw a huge improvement week 8-12, I would’ve tried to stay on the vinegar for at least 3 consecutive months.

And I had originally planned on doing “ex_ricetate” next, which would’ve been just plain white rice with vinegar poured over it.

But a single meal of that convinced me to stop the vinegar for a while. It might’ve been the fact that the starchy rice stuck to my teeth and gave me much worse acid exposure, but that first vinegar rice meal gave me tingly, sensitive teeth for the whole day.

I would get the ACV capsules and take maybe 6 a day, but that’s currently logistically not trivial since I’m on vacation.

So I decided to just do plain white rice. I’ve done ex_rice before, which was white rice + fat free marinara sauce, and didn’t lose any weight. But maybe it’s different without the sauce?

Plus, I still suspect that extreme low-fat diets are uniquely good at depleting adipose linoleic acid. My OmegaQuant Complete tests have reached new lows after each month of very-low fat diets. Maybe I’ll commit to 6 months of HCLFLP at one point, but it seems that even a month makes a noticeable difference.

ex_plainrice it is.