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Drink This Every Night Before Bed To Lower Your Blood Sugar
There’s been plenty of buzz around apple cider vinegar (ACV) in recent years. You may have seen it recommended for various ailments, and thanks to its promised health benefits, ACV has become quite popular. But this isn’t just another wellness trend without any science to back it up: Studies around ACV seem to confirm that it really can be beneficial for our health. And if you struggle to regulate your blood sugar, apple cider vinegar could be the answer you’ve been looking for.
While its popularity might be relatively recent, ACV is nothing new. The vinegar, which is made by fermenting crushed apples with probiotics that turn its sugar into acetic acid, has been used as a home remedy for centuries. This compound has a myriad of health benefits, including lowering cholesterol. Key research has also found that it’s an effective way to regulate blood sugar.
How to make apple cider vinegar lower blood sugar?
“A number of studies suggest that vinegar might prevent spikes in blood sugar in people with prediabetes and type 2 diabetes by blocking starch absorption,” according to Harvard researcher Robert H. Shmerling, MD. In fact, Arizona State University testing shows that vinegar can blunt blood sugar spikes.
One study on people who have type 2 diabetes (which means the body has trouble using insulin properly) found that drinking ACV every night before bed reduced their resting blood sugar levels in the morning. This is likely due to the acetic acid in vinegar, which has an antiglycemic effect. Here’s how it works: Starch, which we get from foods like potatoes and pasta, is full of glucose and can therefore cause blood sugar to spike. But acetic acid helps us absorb less glucose.
How To Use Apple Cider Vinegar To Lower Blood Sugar
Participants in the Arizona State University study took about two tablespoons of ACV every night, which you can dilute with water to make it more palatable. That won’t affect the vinegar’s benefits, and will also give you a boost of hydration before bed. Just make sure to brush your teeth after, since vinegar can be harmful to tooth enamel.
Struggling with high blood sugar and diabetes can feel overwhelming, but eating a healthy diet, along with taking a daily dose of ACV, can put you on the path to better health. As always, make sure to consult your doctor before starting a new regimen to ensure it’s the right thing for you.
Why getting a table at Dallas restaurants is harder than it used to be
The restaurant industry has changed in innumerable ways in recent years, but one shift Dallas diners are coming to terms with is the growing demand for restaurant reservations and the dwindling ability to get a table without one.
The surge in demand for table bookings picked up speed in 2021 as people eagerly returned to in-person dining once COVID-19 cases dropped, but the shift seems here to stay. Walk-in seat availability is harder to come by, and making reservations only a day or two out at popular restaurants often means taking early or late-night seating — or striking out altogether.
The uptick in demand for restaurant reservations is happening nationally. Online searches for reservations in the first quarter of 2022 were up 107% from the same time frame in 2021, according to national data from Yelp. We talked with several local restaurants who said they’ve seen a noticeable owner rise in demand for reservations at Dallas restaurants in the past year.
There are several reasons for the shift. First, there’s the matter of planning and convenience, which is no different now than it’s always been. Diners have schedules to juggle, babysitters to hire, and celebrations to plan around, all of which factor into the demand for reservations.
Then there’s the matter of social currency. Hard-to-get reservations have become a signal of social status. The country’s most coveted restaurant bookings are now being sold to people willing to pay anonymous sellers thousands of dollars on black market sites, like one run by a 34-year-old in Miami, according to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicles.
But restaurants are really driving this change in reservation culture. Still facing workforce shortages and rising operating costs, some restaurants have reduced their hours or scaled down their footprints. This has led restaurants to rely more heavily on reservations to run their businesses, and they’re encouraging them more than ever in a climate of economic uncertainty, says Emily Knight, president of the Texas Restaurant Association.
“In Dallas, we’re running at about a 20% [restaurant] staffing shortage, and with that you’re going to have fewer tables and slimmer menus,” Knight says. “So now what you have is a restaurant that needs much more thoughtful staffing and to know who is coming in and when to dine. And they need to ensure that if that person makes a reservation, that they’re going to really come in.”
TakeTatsu, for example. The omakase restaurant opened in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood in May 2022 and has already become “the city’s hardest reservation,” according to D Magazine dining critic Brian Reinhart. To get a seat at Tatsu, hopeful diners set alarms for 8 am on the first and the 15th of the month when reservations for the tasting menu, which must be paid in full at $170 per person, are released in two-week batches. The seats go quickly. After all, there are only 10 seats and two seats a night.
Matthew Ciccone, owner of Tatsu, says offering a limited number of prepaid reservations is pivotal to their business model and to ensure the level of hospitality and food they strive to execute. He found that releasing any more than 10 days of reservations at a time increases the likelihood of cancellations, even with a policy in place that asks for cancellations to be made five days in advance.
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“By doing it this way, we are controlling our food waste and ordering exactly what we need. The other side of that coin is why we ask for full payment up front. We pay our staff what they should be doing by doing this,” he says. “We can also really tailor the menu to the guests that book, and the only way to do that is to have that money up front.”
Ciccone says there has been a noticeable change in restaurant reservation demands in the Dallas dining scene in the past few years, and he sees it as Dallas catching up to other major cities like New York, where he lived for a decade.
“There’s no such thing as dining out without a reservation there,” he says. “I think this is going to be a new thing here [in Dallas] and part of the trade-off that we’re making with having more good restaurants.”
With that change, though, comes the possibility of people taking advantage of the demand and reselling restaurant reservations for a profit, and it’s something Ciccone is trying to hold off.
“We did an analysis with Tock [a booking site] to make sure people were not using computer programs to book reservations. Tock doesn’t allow people to use a script to book reservations, so we feel comfortable
I was seconds from death after drinking 10 bottles of wine a day, but no one knew what I was going through
A MILITARY veteran has revealed that behind his superficial social media page, he was a “barely functioning” alcoholic drinking about 10 bottles of wine per day.
Alysia Magen, a United States Air Force veteran, said that despite posting on Instagram to portray an idyllic life, in reality, she was “killing herself” by drinking vast quantities of wine and spirits.
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The 33-year-old explained that she would drink almost the entire day to cope with the pain of past relationships.
Magen told The US Sun: “The strong girl was gone – I didn’t know who I was at that time.
“I didn’t know I was an alcoholic – I thought it was just something to manage anxiety. I would wake up in the morning shaking from withdrawal,” Magen continued.
She explained that she thought she was using the alcohol to merely manage panic attacks at first, only to find out that it was instead to fight withdrawal later on.
“I was so mentally sick and could see I was in pain and not there. I feel like a fraud and a fake because I was living a lie for so long.”
“Throughout that period I wasn’t the person I am at all. I was scared to even go outside and meet people. At times I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror,” Magen confessed.
Ultimately, Magen said she realized that she was abusing alcohol to block out trauma from abusive relationships — and it started a long time ago.
She revealed that her drinking began while in the military and progressively got worse after being demoted for posting a suggestive picture of herself on Instagram alongside another one of her in military uniform.
Her charge was what’s known as Article 15.
Magen claimed that she was ostracized after it happened and she spent her last six months in the military in “painful isolation”.
After being demobbed in 2017, Alysia threw herself into social media full-time which involved unconventional hours and lots of parties.
This led to her drinking progressively getting worse before it spiraled out of control over the following four years.
During that time she said she had a succession of violent and abusive relationships with former partners.
Alysia explained that in addition to drinking she was taking cocaine and other drugs including opioids during this period.
Near-death experience
At one point she overdosed while her ex-boyfriend was driving – prompting him to rush her to the emergency room.
“The doctors said if I had been 10 seconds later, I would have died,” she explained.
“I was literally seconds from death but I didn’t care. I had lost all interest in life.
“Dealing with all that pain and trauma makes you want to get high to numb the pain,” she continued.
“It’s a vicious cycle and I knew I had to change but it’s hard when you continually get pulled back.”
As time went on and Alysia became sicker and sicker, she realized in March of this year that something had to change.
After a difficult stay in a Veterans Affairs-funded rehab center, she decided to shell out $10,000 to check in to a private facility.
This enabled her to kick the drinking, leave her then-partner, and set her on a road to recovery.
Recovering and re-emerging
And weeks into sobriety, she received a phone call asking if she would fight model and influencer, Blac Chyna, in a celebrity bout in June.
She jumped at the chance and despite earning a draw, Magen knocked Rob Kardashian’s ex on her back during the fight and said training for it “kept her on the road to recovery.”
“I’ve been reborn in six months,” she said.
“I was seconds from death, in abusive relationships and dependent on alcohol.”
“I didn’t think I needed help because I’d been in the military and had this attitude like ‘nothing affects me.’
“I did not go through all of those things to keep the story inside,” she said.
“So get the support and help you need because nobody deserves to be abused by the people who are supposed to love them.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
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