RT @nclarkrd: Is stress the root cause of weight gain/obesity? Have we been looking in the wrong places (diet, exercise) when a bigger trig…
My lemon with water experiment Day 6
Me and my lemon again! The weather's got a little chilly last day or so so I've decided to sip my lemon with water as a warm drink. I was making it up with chilled water from the fridge but this got too cold for my stomach first thing in the morning.
To make the warm version, I simply boil the kettle, pour a cup of hot boiled water into a mug then leave it to cool for 10 minutes. THEN I add the lemon juice. Here's why. Vitamin C is heat sensitive so if I used the freshly-boiled water, I figured this could destroy a fair proportion of the vitamin C that I'm getting from the juice.
Is it the vitamin C maybe?
Half a lemon yields around 3 tablespoons of lemon juice which gives you around 35mg vitamin C which is quite a reasonable amount - over half my recommended day's intake of 45mg a day. Plus there's a decent quantity of potassium which helps counteract excess salt and regulate fluid balance in the body along with citrus flavonoid antioxidants. A nice bonus!
I'm trying to keep the experiment equivalent to the cold water drink. It could be the vitamin C in the lemons that is responsible for any appetite-suppressing effect. Who knows? Or it could just be the acidity. Whatever the cause, I want to be sure I'm comparing like with like so I'm just drinking warm water with lemon. Hence I'm using the term "warm water" rather than "hot water" so you know what I mean. You could simply mix half hot boiling water with half cold water from the tap or a filter - I'm just using all cooled boiled water so it's the same throughout.