Posted on: Friday, June 24, 2005

ADVICE DIVA
Can't get enough of vinegar

By Tara Solomon

Dear Advice Diva:

I fear I have a serious addiction. Although not serious compared to other addictions, it certainly is dictating my diet and lifestyle. My addiction is vinegar.

I wake up in the morning and think of the perfect food I can eat to go with vinegar — usually fried eggs and fried tomatoes, as they're perfect with red wine vinegar. For lunch, I have a salad to go with my dressing, which is always vinegar-based. At a restaurant, I go straight for the balsamic vinegar (95 percent), olive oil (4 percent) and ground pepper and salt (1 percent) for my bread.

During the day, I think of what vinegary foods I can cook at night. The only side effects so far are hot flushes, but I know it's bad because I now drink vinegar straight from the bottle. Please help!

— J. Clarke

Dear J.:

Reading your letter makes us want to run for a ramekin of cornichons and pickled beets! We fear that whatever you have, we have, too. The vinegar thing, for us, started as a childhood obsession, satisfied by a mound of dill pickle slices (eaten as is) or tomato salad dressed with apple cider vinegar, kosher salt and cracked pepper.

To find out if the two of us suffer from some obsessive-compulsive food disorder, we consulted Dr. Jeffrey D. Kamlet, an internist who is president of the Florida Society of Addiction Medicine. His verdict: We're indeed obsessive.

"There's no disease that would make the body crave vinegar, such as when a hypoglycemic craves sugar," Kamlet says. And vinegar urges don't meet the definition of pica, an eating disorder in which people crave "substances not fit as food or of no nutritional value, i.e. clay, dried plants, starch or ice," according to Stedman's Medical Dictionary.

Kamlet recommends getting blood work done to rule out any mineral or vitamin deficiencies before considering a possible (ahem) obsessive-compulsive eating disorder in which the natural cleansing properties of vinegar are viewed as a weight-loss mechanism. "Someone with OCD may ingest more and more vinegar to excess, like people who take laxatives. Their reasoning is, 'If a little is good, a lot is better.' It's an obsession."

The good news, J.: At least we're not eating anything truly gross, such as paint chips or lint!

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