APPLE CIDER VINEGAR:
A Modern Folk Remedy
An Earth Clinic Publication
Deirdre Layne, Founder Earth Clinic
Daniel P. Kray
for Body Axis, LLC
Body Axis, LLC.
Atlanta
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010934686
Copyright © 2010 by Body Axis, LLC.
Cover design by Christina Rahr Lane
Book design by Denise Wellenstein
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
DISCLAIMER
The preparation and publication of this book has been undertaken with great care. However, the book is offered for informational purposes only and cannot be taken as a substitute for professional medical prevention, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your physician, pharmacist, or health care provider before taking any home remedies or supplements or following any treatment suggested by anyone within this book. Only your health care provider, personal physician, or pharmacist can provide you with advice on what is safe and effective for your unique needs or diagnose your particular medical history.
Reader feedback taken from the EarthClinic.com website and included in this book is the opinion of the reader alone and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or beliefs of Body Axis LLC, Earth Clinic LLC, this book, or its authors.
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
FIRST PRINTING: 2010
ISBN-978-0-9828963-1-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Welcome to the Earth Clinic Community!
All Well and Good, but Why Should You Trust Us?
Apple Cider Vinegar: A Classic Remedy
Apples into Cider: Sweet and Hard
The Science of Apple Cider Vinegar
Apple Cider Vinegar and pH Balance
It’s Good for that Too: Ailments Remedied by ACV
Bladder Infection/Bladder Issues
IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)
A Few Last Songs from the Orchard
Additional Resources on the Website
Chapter One
WELCOME TO THE EARTH CLINIC COMMUNITY!
You might be joining Earth Clinic for the first time with this book, or perhaps you have been with us online from the very start. In any case, you are a welcome part of the Earth Clinic Community. EarthClinic.com, an alternative health and healing site, was launched on the web in 1999 as a local site for our founder, Deirdre Layne’s healing practice. It only grew into the internet hotspot it has become because people took interest in the idea of simple, effective, tried-and-true remedies and the idea of sharing them with each other. Except that the people of that community contributed their ideas and experiences, the site would never have been more than a few happy, healthy people out there talking in circles about the one little amazing remedy that started it all.
Apple Cider Vinegar was that first remedy.
Deirdre had a healing practice in Los Angeles at the time, supported by a miniscule website advertising her services in the busy whir of California life and business. With her allergies acting up during one particular spin through that maelstrom, Deirdre came across the health benefits of apple cider vinegar, was convinced to try it out against her allergy symptoms, and then posted her experiences on the website simply as an aside. And that was that, the start of an entirely different crazy storm of interest and vibrant energy that has made EarthClinic.com an international Top Five Alternative Health site on the internet. Earth Clinic has since become a community of shared knowledge — generations and nations full of it — that has brought health and hope through safe, inexpensive, natural cures and home remedies to people around the world. All of them have been contributed, tried, and reported on by regular people just like you.
All Well and Good, but Why Should You Trust Us?
Yes, that is as good and fair a question as any, and an important one in the medical and health business — a place where enormous amounts of money can be made with the right drug, treatment, or well-advertised snake oil. Earth Clinic is different, we promise you that, and we think we’ve proven it through the years. Not only are the members of our community the major contributors of our cures and feedback, but they are also our only constituents. We take no money from any businesses. We don’t accept advertising except through disinterested third parties (like Google advertising systems), and what we offer is generally so cheap (even free) that no one could be expected to make a fortune off it. In all honesty, Earth Clinic never started out to become any sort of business of its own or even something we intended to spend much time on. It was chance alone that saw ACV attract so much attention and then so many other reader contributions on alternative health and folk medicine, so that the site took on a life of its own.
Earth Clinic simply blossomed from that first uncertain apple seed into an orchard full of effective, home-tested, and community-vetted remedies and cures proven through years on the site and before that in the homes of commonsense families for centuries. Eventually, so many cures began to accumulate that Earth Clinic became a responsibility, a collection of cures and remedies so good that it was our duty to share them with as many people as we could. That is the reason you hold this book in your hands right now, as the first and probably most important of the remedies we intend to bring to a wider community than even the internet can hold.
We appreciate that community more than we can express, and each day we happily dedicate more time to this growing group of folks because of people like our friend Goji, from London, who wrote to tell us:
“I’ve just reached the ripe old age of 72 years, but inwardly still feel 20. However, over the last few months I have been having problems finding enough energy to get through household and other tasks and, well life had lost its magic. I felt like an old person. In the past I’d tried a well-known brand of ACV, but it did nothing to help how I felt. Then about a fortnight ago I came across an iconic brand (I’m not allowed to mention names) of raw, unfiltered ACV containing the Mother, and I began taking one tablespoon in water sweetened with stevia three times a day just before meals. I now wake up with a song in my heart, the world has suddenly become beautiful again, and my energy has been restored. And I feel the way I walk has become more free, looser somehow, as though I am walking more like a younger person.”
We believe you can trust Earth Clinic for two principle reasons. First, many of our completely natural cures cost you no more than a buck apiece, so you have little enough to lose. Furthermore, we have no interest in being the one to collect that dollar from you. That’s how we’re different, not a billion-dollar biotech trying to foist an expensive half-cure off on you.
The second and more important reason is how seriously we take the idea of community. Earth Clinic is nothing more or less than a collection of friends and helpful neighbors who know that we find safety only as we lead each other toward mutual health and happiness. The cures we are bringing to you here are the cures that first were brought to us, the same cures we have used ourselves. We wouldn’t steer you wrong, because someday we’ll be depending on you to steer us in the right direction in turn.
How Earth Clinic Works
We began as a healing practice, one that was always interested in other and better healing practices, and if you’re looking for a world full of time-tested ideas on how to naturally restore and promote your own health and the health of your family, the internet really is the place to start. No other medium for communication makes it so easy to invite in age-old secrets from around the world — whether it’s from a Korean apple cider vinegar maker, a Russian proponent for beets, or a woman from New Zealand who can tell you about a curative plant you’d never heard of before. Hand-me-down remedies started to arrive so quickly in succession that the problem became how exactly to tell which were the good ideas out of all those sent in to the site.
When we recently decided to offer the absolute best of all those natural health remedies in this more accessible printed form, that need to sift the grain from the chaff became even more critical. Fortunately, a process has long been in place to help bring the very most dependable and successful remedies to our attention. That process quite simply is to tally how often a particular remedy has worked, for how many people, and in how many different ways it has improved the lives of our readers and contributors in the community.
The Earth Clinic site has always been a democratic one. Once readers contribute an idea for a cure or remedy, we leave it open to our community members to try the remedy themselves, see whether it works for them, and then ask them to report back with their reviews. It has been through the process of evaluating all that feedback that we’ve put together a system we find clear enough: if readers have gotten good results, they give the remedy a Yea, a Nay if it didn’t work, or a Maybe if their health didn’t turn out too clearly for the better or the worse after that particular folk medical treatment. Given a little time, the cream of all possible cures tends to rise to the top, but the fact of the matter is that every bit of wisdom and experience is liable to prove beneficial to someone in our community of health.
In our experience, what we find (and what somehow expensive medical science hasn’t figured out) is that people differ in what they need and how they react to different remedies. For some, cayenne pepper will be just the thing they were looking for, but it won’t do a thing for the guy who simply needed to add a bit of honey to his diet for the same condition. We’re all different, inside and out, and that’s why Earth Clinic gives you more than one option to pursue for most conditions, and we give you the straight skinny from our readers themselves so that you can find the person whose condition sounds most like your own.
Why Apple Cider Vinegar?
Okay then, if the Earth Clinic site is so bursting with shared wisdom, why present a book on apple cider vinegar alone? Well, after all, the site began with apple cider vinegar. That wasn’t a simple bit of chance but the best of all possible luck, kismet, serendipity, or (we can only hope) good karma. Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV is what we most often call it around here) has become the very first option most of our community turns to almost regardless of what health concern presents itself. ACV isn’t a cure-all, nothing is, but we haven’t found any other thing that does so much for so many people at so little cost in terms of either money or side effects.
Apple Cider Vinegar, among the oldest and most treasured of the world’s home remedies, cures more ailments than any other folk remedy – years of international contributions and personal experience have us convinced. That running process of tabulating the Yeas and Nays of personal experience on the website brought ACV head and shoulders above the competition and straight to our attention for more research and the comprehensive presentation of apple cider vinegar as a modern folk remedy, as we will be presenting it in this book.
We’ve received extensive feedback on all our remedies over the past ten years, but the reported cures from consuming and applying Apple Cider Vinegar are by far the most numerous. They include cures for allergies (including pet, food and environmental), sinus infections, acne, high cholesterol, flu, chronic fatigue, candida, acid reflux, sore throats, contact dermatitis, arthritis, and even gout (who knew that people still come down with gout?).
Many readers enjoy the fact that apple cider vinegar breaks down fats, and so it is widely used to help us lose weight. It also has been reported that a daily dose of apple cider vinegar can bring high blood pressure under control within two weeks! Apple Cider Vinegar is wonderful for pets, including dogs, cats, and horses. It ameliorates their arthritic conditions, controls fleas & barn flies, and gives a beautiful shine to their coats.
Now for certain, this is vinegar and not a spoonful of sugar. Some folks take to the flavor immediately — and in particular children seem naturally to crave it when offered — but even in the small amounts your body needs, frequent doses of apple cider vinegar can be a tough sell. If you can get over your fears about the taste of apple cider vinegar, you will find it one of the most important natural remedies in healing the body. In fact, you would be in a small minority if you weren’t soon trying to explain to friends and family about how much you’ve come to enjoy its flavor. Then again, maybe they’ll just see it in your face — as a wonderful side effect of drinking apple cider vinegar every day, we’ve discovered that it brings a healthy, rosy glow to one’s complexion! This is great news if you suffer from a pale countenance.
Over the years we have come to love and cherish our online community. It has made us part of a group that has brought so much health and real happiness to people all over the world, as well as freedom from pain and relief from the anxiety about health when health is lacking. That’s exactly as much as we could ask from life. We are very proud of EarthClinic.com, but the internet can’t be with us everywhere, not on Grandma’s farm when Johnny’s allergies start up or out at camp when Rebekkah feels sick to her stomach from eating too many roasted marshmallows. We’d also like to welcome all the folks into our community who wouldn’t know an internet if it zapped them in the USB port!
This book has been woven together with those ideas in mind, for those people who want to keep the secrets of ACV close at home even if a computer is far away, the loyal community members who want to share our secrets with friends and family, and for the people who would never meet up with these ideas unless they were to be found on a book rack or a coffee table.
If you have visited our website, much of this will be familiar to you. We have distilled the best and most informative feedback about ACV from that invaluable resource, but there is much you will find that is new as well. Earth Clinic trusts in the voice of personal experience and has let that voice do most of the talking on the website, but now we want to support all of those personal reports (yes, you’ll find the best of them in here) with a bit of history and the reassuring certainty that scientific study can offer.
Chapter 2
APPLE CIDER VINEGAR: A CLASSIC REMEDY
Apple cider vinegar is quite unlike this continuing parade of miracle cures we’ve seen and read so much about of late. It isn’t one of those cure-alls that strut briefly to their spot in front of the global grandstand, soon to depart after a moment of fame. ACV has been a cure for what ails you for as long as there has been any sort of medicine at all. The use of vinegar in general is as old as human history; wherever there have been alcoholic beverages, some form of vinegar was sure to follow, and at least the most obvious virtues and exotic allure of vinegar would have been recognized right away.
Of course, that begs the question as to why a book such as this need even exist. If vinegar has been around for that long, shouldn’t the world have come to appreciate it by now? By and large, the answer is yes, and the reason there is a need for this book is simply that we have forgotten all of its virtues and erased the once worthy role of vinegars from our life. Certainly, we still have vinegar here and there in the course of our diets, such as they are, but modern grocery stores and the international food trade offer us so many choices that foundational parts of our historical diets, such as vinegar once was, have been pushed aside for mere variety (or, more regrettably, for the easy pleasure of fast food and junk foods).
Clearly something isn’t right. This should be the age of medical miracles, but our health complaints seem to be at an all time high. There you have the other reason why this book has a necessary place in the world. Take for instance acid reflux and similar digestive disorders, which seem to affect everyone these days. Few people would think to add an acid like ACV to their diet to bring relief from an acid condition, yet our readers are astounded by their success in using ACV to permanently settle their acid reflux and heartburn. The half dozen producers of expensive commercial medicines targeting acid reflux would hardly be pleased to have us consider a natural, inexpensive alternative. But it works!