Nutbars

The first thing I do every morning is pour two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar into two fingers of water, pinch my nose and chug it down.

Joy doesn’t do this, but I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m convinced that it has reduced the number of sinus infections I get each year.

If you Google ‘apple cider vinegar’ you’ll see hundreds of websites on the health benefits of this natural elixir. If you believe a fraction of them, Hippocrates, the Roman Legion, Jesus and Christopher Columbus all drank it for health reasons.

Why did I start this habit? Well, a few years ago, Joy remarked to me that if you drink apple cider vinegar on an empty stomach it ‘alkalinizes your body’ – meaning it resets your body’s pH to its natural default level before you bombard it with acidic food for the next 18 hours.

Apple cider vinegar also contains Acetic acid, which lowers the body’s pH levels and creates an inhospitable environment for infections.

The Internet would have you believe that apple cider vinegar has miraculous health benefits. I don’t know about all that. The most balanced website I’ve found on this subject is here.

My personal choice is Bragg’s organic raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar. Check out their website - it’s quirky, with echoes of Minnie Pearl and Hee Haw. But once you get over the look of the site and read their philosophy, it’s pretty sound. Paul Bragg believed in a diet that “focused on natural live foods”.

The Bragg website reminds me of the Dr. Bronner soaps that we use. I like Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, which he first sold from his tenement-based store in L.A.’s Pershing Square in 1948.

Dr. Bronner was crazy. He had been in an asylum the previous year. He used to give lectures on how the world would be saved by planetariums, but he noticed that people just bought his peppermint soap and left. So he started printing his save-the-world rants in microscopic print on his soap bar wrappers.

Joy uses a term – Nutbars. I think she’d say the Braggs and Dr. Bronner were Nutbars.

Joy likes Nutbars. They seem to be untainted by commercialism and societal norms. They don’t care what you think about them. They just think they’re right.

And sometimes the Nutbars are exactly right.

Check out this short You Tube Video on Dr. Bronner.