Lord Byron vinegar weight-reduction plan can have a series of harmful health effects

Romantic poet Lord Byron – famed for his wealthy and expressive portrayal of landscape and human emotions – is taken into account to be one in all the important thing figures of English literature.

Over the course of his life, nevertheless, he suffered from a raft of health problems, starting from vertigo, clubfoot and gonhorrea to malaria and even bulimia and anorexia.

The dubious treatment methods of the time were recorded in his writings, including the well-known burlesque epic poem Don Juan. Here he mentions the consumption of Epsom saltswhich were used as a laxative, or as a muscle relaxer when dissolved in bathwater. They were also combined with other strong diuretics and cathartics to purge the body and induce vomiting.

Demanding diets

In his youth, Byron followed strict diets to avoid the issues suffered by his mother as a consequence of being chubby. At one point, he experimented with consuming only 1 / 4 pound (113g) of meat per day alongside small amounts of wine.

In his later years he turned to vinegar, believing the sour liquid could reduce his appetite. The resulting weight reduction was dramatically successful, nevertheless it took its toll: dental problems, vomiting and diarrhoea became constant features of his life. He ingested it only with water and rice, as he thought this may enhance its cleansing effects.

As a results of this and other extreme diets, the author managed to cut back his Body Mass Index (BMI) from 29.7 to 22.1 kg/m² a minimum of twice in his life, in 1806 and in 1822. While in Venice, before his second substantial weight reduction, his lawyer reported being troubled by his pale, bloated and sickly appearance.

Other victims of vinegar

Byron was not alone in using vinegar for slimming purposes in his time, as various tragic events show. One of the earliest published cases of this involved a French woman called Mademoiselle Lapaneterie in 1773. Worried by her physique and the red color of her skin, she followed her neighbour’s advice of drinking a small cup of vinegar per day to shed some pounds and achieve a fairer complexion.

As the doctor Pierre Desault reported, Lapaneterie followed this advice for over a month. She saw her weight decrease and her vivid complexion – considered undesirable for ladies on the time – became paler. However, she soon developed a cough, night sweats, nausea, swollen feet and legs, and diarrhoea, and he or she eventually died.

A second case was reported in 1826, two years after Lord Byron’s death. Louise, a young women from Dijon, took to drinking vinegar because “the young people where she lived were making fun of her”. The weight-reduction plan also led her to an early grave.

Despite cases resembling these, the commonplace cooking ingredient formed the idea of slimming diets across Europe – especially in France – throughout the 18th century and remained popular until the mid-Nineteenth century.

The serious health effects of drinking vinegar

In 1998, a gaggle of researchers on the Department of Internal Medicine on the Medical University of Innsbruck (Austria) observed that top vinegar consumption can have three fundamental harmful effects:

• Hypocalcaemia: Low levels of calcium within the blood serum, which might cause muscle spasms.

• Hyperreninaemia: Excessive levels of renin (a hormone produced by the kidneys) within the blood. The body’s homeostatic response to this ends in hypertension and kidney failure.

• Osteoporosis: A condition that weakens bones, making them brittle and more vulnerable to break or fracture.

The effects of vinegar on teeth

In 2012, a clinical report was published of a 15 12 months old girl who was affected by eroded teeth brought on by drinking a glass of cider vinegar every day. Curiously, Byron was also troubled by his teeth. He chewed and smoked tobacco in the assumption that it could preserve his dental health and, in later years, to stave off hunger. At the tip of his life, he still had some white teeth remaining, but they’d turn into somewhat loose.

At least one study has shown that white vinegar, cider vinegar and hydrogen peroxide can each whiten and weaken teeth. Additionally, in 2016 it was observed that white vinegar may cause greater levels of harm to the hardness and quality of tooth enamel.

However, based on a study led by Philipp Kanzowthe presence and severity of those erosive defects also rely on several aspects including nutrition, saliva composition, disease and abrasive stress.

Appetite suppressant

The slimming effect that Byron attributed to vinegar almost certainly got here from its ability to suppress the appetite. In 1998 it was shown that acetic acid – the chemical that offers vinegar its characteristic taste and smell – significantly reduces glucose and insulin response after eating, perhaps attributable to a reduced digestion rate.

This suggests that the spike in blood sugar levels after a meal might be reduced by consuming vinegar. This is since it causes the body to take longer to digest food, meaning carbohydrates are broken down more slowly.

Our study suggests that Lord Byron’s vinegar weight-reduction plan did help him to shed some pounds and provides him a paler complexion. However, its long run consumption could have contributed significantly to the anorexia nervosa – complicated by episodes of bulimia – from which he suffered.