Feeling peckish one day in 2017, Darshna Yagnik, an immunologist and lecturer in biomedical science at Middlesex University, took a punt on something that had been lurking at the back of the fridge. She soon regretted it and started feeling queasy. Desperate to avoid food poisoning, she racked her brains for something that might help – and remembered the bottle of apple cider vinegar (ACV) in the cupboard. She decided to glug a diluted shot. “Immediately, I felt like there was something going on, combating the bacteria,” she says. “My stomach was gurgling and after about 10 minutes it started feeling soothed. After about half an hour or an hour, I felt much better.”
At that moment, she realised she was using her own body for research. “I was thinking: what is going on with this apple cider vinegar? This is possibly having an effect on E coli. Let me test it in the laboratory.” She went on to do “a multitude of experiments” throughout the pandemic, resulting in a 2021 paper demonstrating that ACV kills E coli and MRSA in petri dishes almost as effectively as common antibiotics. However, it is not clear how this would translate to the human body.
