Apple Cider Vinegar - a review, and why it matters

I made a documentary on health conspiracy. Apple Cider Vinegar is a vital show.

I’ve been crunchy since before it was cool.

As a teen, mom and I tried our hand at sugar free cakes (meh), I gave up meat and alcohol, and early on questioned chemical use in cosmetics and household products.

It made complete sense to me that what we put into our bodies has an effect on our health. It’s logical. Why would you consume something you couldn’t pronounce? I’m still of the opinion we over-use chemicals in our households; profit-driven companies have normalised use of harsh chemicals to a ridiculous degree. It damages aquatic life and likely causes both short and long term health issues. But you know - there’s a limit. If your bathroom stinks, sometimes it just needs some sodding bleach.

For me, though, my crunchy experiments never crossed the border into messing with big health decisions like vaccines or disease. Vaccines was a fact, a saving grace, not something I ever even began to question. Nor would I quiz a doctor on their approach to surgery, or a treatment plan.

Of course, these views have become nuanced as I’ve aged, occasionally running into doctors who don’t listen and a health establishment that looks only at your pain or single issue, rather than the body as a whole. I did still have great respect for some ‘natural’ therapies.

As an example, a Chinese acupuncturist once cured my dance injury, and later discovered my mum’s cancer. True story.

Where conventional medicine had utterly failed to diagnose a very serious condition, this random London high-street acupuncturist lady probably gave mom an extra year of life. The GP and prescribed her paracetamol, and puzzled at mom’s blackouts, radiating arm pains and chronic bowel issues. The acupuncturist touched her for a few minutes and said ‘you have an obstruction in your bowel’. And thus she went for a colonoscopy.

Even then, though, my mother didn’t forsake normal cancer therapy. She did the chemo. She also did shots of immunotherapy and other experimental natural treatments meant to function ‘like’ chemo.

None worked, in the end. But the first round of chemo bought her time. Maybe six more months of feeling relatively healthy? Six months is a lot, even when chemo sucks.

In summary, I have a complex and varied relationship to natural therapies, and it’s fascinated and horrified me to see that community slide further and further into conspiracy and far right alarmist language.

In 2021, after a year of lockdown and the online discourse fractioning into wishes for simple solutions and the vaccine debate getting out of hand, we decided to make a documentary on the topic. I didn’t expect the result though - to sympathise with many of the people I met. Our focus was women, and women are, frankly, let down by the system a lot. They had reasons - knowing people who had bad reaction to vaccines. Distrust in the health establishment. A need to be strong and healthy on your own terms, because you quite simply can’t afford healthcare.

We came across other people too - people with next to no principles, riding waves of clickbait into peddling snake oil.

I’ve been waiting for someone to deal with the hustle culture of the wellness industry in fiction format. Apple Cider Vinegar does it brilliantly, in honing in on Aussie hustler and cancer faker Belle Gibson.

But it’s not just the Anna Delvey-esque Belle we follow - we also see ‘Milla Blake’, a young woman genuinely dealing with cancer. She tries to respond to it with the crunchy mindset that it must be her own fault, and if she just juices enough, the cancer will go away. These dangerous places still exist; places that purport to cure you if you just do enough enemas and go vegan and chant in the woods.

We see their family and friends, people pulled and sucked into the vortex of their decisions. And the consequences are dire.

Here’s the thing I learnt: The best misinformation is always partly true. The real-life woman behind Blake’s character had some success initially with her natural therapy approach. No doubt a healthy lifestyle has a marked effect on your health, and could possibly stave off even serious disease - for a time. The anti-vax argument entirely forgets that it is much, much worse to actually deal with full disease than boosting your natural immunity by encountering a weakened virus. Just like that, the natural therapies rarely, if ever, stand a chance against a shitty, multiplying, cell-destroying fucker like cancer.

And juice peddlers are not doctors. ACV is hard, and dark, to watch. It’s devastating to see the sorrow these decisions bring to the families around the two central characters. The actors and the script have managed to convey their battle and pain with great subtlety and nuance, and we ultimately sympathise with Milla, and even the lying Belle. She had herself seemingly been subject to emotional neglect and abuse, and predictably reacted with attention-seeking behaviour. It’s just that with social media, once persons misguided opinions now has the genuine potential to influence millions. And we’d all so very much like to be those shining, healthy beach people; thin, juice-swigging and glowing.

It’s just worth remembering that some of those people also have ringworm.

Major ick. (Photo: Apple Cider Vinegar, Netflix)