Becca sent me the FDA press release at 6:14 a.m. with seventeen exclamation points and a screenshot of a post she made in October 2023 saying almost exactly the same thing. She runs a Facebook group called Apple Cider Vinegar Stories They Tried to Bury, and she has been waiting for this Wednesday morning since roughly the Obama administration.
The new guidance, for anyone not on Becca’s distribution list, tightens the rules around the semaglutide shots — the ones every cousin you have is suddenly on and every cousin’s husband is quietly on too. The FDA wants more long-term safety data, more pharmacist disclosure, more labeling about what happens when you stop. Becca read this as “the FDA admitted vinegar works.” That is, technically, not what the document says. But I see her point and so does she.
Here is where I’m coming from. I have four children. I have lost the same eight pounds since 2019, and I have done it the slow honest way: bone broth, long walks, raw garlic when I feel a wobble, and a tablespoon of mother-of-vinegar before anything I’m nervous about. Nobody handed me a pen with a needle in it. Nobody told me the side effect of being thin was that your face also has to leave.
My sister-in-law Jenna, who works the front desk at a pediatric urgent care and is basically a nurse, has been telling me for two years that the shot patients come in for their kids’ appointments and you can smell something on them. She calls it “the medicine smell.” I asked what it smells like and she said, without hesitating, “warm pennies and giving up.” I am not making that up. She said it twice and then she said it a third time to make sure I wrote it down.
Becca’s group has been keeping a spreadsheet. There are 340 entries now. Things people report losing on the shot in addition to weight: hair, the ability to enjoy a peach, their grandmother’s gravy recipe (the brain just lets it go, apparently), the desire to garden, eyebrow density, the smell of a campfire, and in 41 separate entries, “the joy.” The joy column is its own tab. The FDA did not address the joy column. The FDA never does.
I am not here to judge anyone. I have a friend on it. I love her. I will say that when she came over for soup last Tuesday she took two sips, set her spoon down like it had betrayed her personally, and explained — with the calm of a hostage — that food is now a “concept” to her. I make that soup with marrow bones I save in the chest freezer for nine months. It is not a concept. It is a soup. It is, frankly, the soup.
What Becca and I agree on — and what I think the new guidance is gently, federally, finally confirming — is that we were not designed to outsource hunger. Hunger is information. Hunger says “you skipped lunch” or “you need magnesium” or “the children are about to fight each other, eat something before you have to intervene.” When you turn the volume on hunger all the way down, you can still hear the children fight. You just can’t do anything about it, because you’re staring at the kettle thinking about warm pennies.
A woman in the group — I don’t know her, she goes by HeatherK1982, she has a profile picture of a heron — posted a really beautiful thing yesterday. She said the body keeps a ledger. She said the shot doesn’t pay the ledger, it just hides the bill. I screenshot it. I sent it to Jenna. Jenna sent back three sparkle emojis and the word “exactly,” which from Jenna is basically a peer-reviewed paper with a foreword.
So Becca is having people over Saturday to celebrate the guidance. She is making a drink with raw apple cider vinegar, raw honey, and shaved ginger that she is calling, with full chest, “a corrective tonic.” I’m bringing the soup. Cleo is coming. Marlene is threatening not to come, which means she is coming and bringing a casserole nobody asked for. The FDA didn’t invite us, but the guidance, in a real and quiet way, is for us. We have been ready since 2019. We have been ready since the peach.