The apple cider vinegar diet is simple enough to understand: Just imbibe a bit of apple cider vinegar before or during meals. The vinegar is supposed to help your body break down food more effectively, and the pectin it contains is supposed to make you feel full faster, so that you eat less.

But although apple cider vinegar has been used as a folk remedy for hundreds of years, unfortunately, there isn’t much evidence that the “diet” does anything to improve weight loss, as both Harvard Health and CNN explain.

A nutritionist noted a problem with one oft-cited study about the apple cider vinegar diet. It found that participants who consumed vinegar did lose weight more reliably than study participants who didn’t have any. But the weight lost amounted to two to four pounds over 12 weeks. As she put it:

“That’s only a third of a pound a week. Most diets have a much bigger result. So you would definitely have to do many other things to accomplish any significant weight loss.”

Research has found that apple cider vinegar seems to be effective for reducing blood-sugar spikes, which could help people with diabetes or prediabetes. That’s a big deal. But if you want to lose real weight, you’ll have to look elsewhere!