2. Changing my diet helped clean up my acne (not eating junk food)
3. When I was a teenager, I got hurt really bad, and my father found me and had to take me to the hospital. I saw massive acne breakout on his face in less than 15 minutes.
4. When I got older and was less stressed about life, my acne went away. When I got a family/career/house and life stress was severe, acne would come back.
I think there a huge health and stress connection to acne.
There is no moral to this story.
This. Actually, for me, it wasn't really the diet in general, but making a switch to drinking water instead of pretty much any other drink (*especially soft drinks!). I went on a hike for a couple of weeks as a teenager, and I think that not having access to anything but water to drink was enough to change my habits.
My high school health teacher insisted that chocolate does not cause acne, according to the research. Her definitive statement made me ignore what my father had been telling me for years. That's the problem with health science, you never know if you are an outlier to which the research does not apply.
PS: Acne as an already awkward and hormone supersaturated kid totally sucked.
My theory is that it's caused by air being dryer in the plane, as my lips are usually chapped on/after flight.
I myself pretty much only ate junk food, although my diet was very low cal. i avoided the sun because i burned very easy, but I was outside a lot. i was always under a high amount of stress, but i never got acne or anything like that
edit: by junkfood, i mostly ate cereal and lots of cookies/candy bars
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting-effects-...
Anecdotally, I tried everything before going on accutane. I cut out sugar to the point of avoiding fruits with high glycemic indexes. I cut out dairy. I cut out meat. I tried every supplement you can imagine. If you're thinking about asking "but did you try X", don't bother, I did.
Only accutane worked.
Reading studies such as this, as well as the internet discussion regarding acne is a bit frustrating. Yes, there are anecdotes of this and that diet and lifestyle change reducing acne, but there's very little clinical evidence that non medical treatment improves cases of cystic acne, and yes, many diet studies have been performed.
Even this study grossly overstates their conclusions. Studying two primitive societies is not nearly enough data to support the conclusion in the title of this article.
And every comment is essentially the same. It’s the only thing that worked for me.
I still love to read them. I’m still amazed by it. It’s literally the only drug I’ve ever encountered that could truly be called a “magic pill” in that it will permanently cure you of what you are taking it for.
The side effects are pretty crazy though. I had to wear sunglasses even when it was cloudy due to photosensitivy for the months I was taking it. Carried Aquaphor in my pocket for the perpetually dry lips and my whole face pretty much flaked off during the first few weeks.
100% worth it. I get a minor pimple every 6 months or so if I don’t wash my face. It used to be completely covered with acne.
A single round of it when I was 16 totally cleared me up. That was over 20 years ago.
Luckily for me, my mom remembered how my dad's acne in high school left his face scarred, so she got me into a dermatologist at the first signs of cystic acne.
The doctor tried everything on me, and Accutane was the last resort.
I implore:
If you have kids with acne, please, take them to a real skin doctor. Don't rely on unproven treatments like cutting carbs or dairy or meat. You have one chance to get it right, and if you don't, they'll have to live with facial scarring forever.
I see adults with acne or scarring and I am so thankful I was put on Accutane.
I have also heard a rumor that recent studies suggest solid vitamin D pills are better than oil capsules. Would be nice if somebody knowing what particular study says this could share a link.
Would taking 10x the RDA of Vitamin D daily have any side effects? (overdose?)
And also Anecdotally I am also on imuno suppressants and touch wood haven't had a cold this winter - yay
Snake Oil Supplements?
Scientific evidence for popular health supplements
Showing tangible human health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet (Mar 23rd 2017)
"Vitamin D supplementation decreases all-cause mortality in adults and older individuals" http://acpjc.acponline.org/Content/pdf/ACPJC-2008-148-2-030....
(It's a review of randomized control trials of Vitamin D supplementation.)
The underlying assumption when hacking is that if you don't understand the internals of something that's ok, but you can rely on understanding the interface, and your manipulation of the interface is skilled enough that you can get the results you need.
In this case, we don't even remotely understand the interface or manipulating it.
Citation needed.
Who really understands how meltdown and spectre work without asking? Smart people ask questions, and like answers. Add wisdom, and you can appreciate answers that challenge your own biases.
[edit: clarification]
Edit: IMO, "hacking" is simply recognizing that the scientific community moves at a glacial pace and not waiting around for "experts" to arrive at a consensus 30 years from now to change something about your lifestyle/diet today that has been shown to be true of animals/smaller scale human studies many times over.
And then publicly shame others for finding ways to heal themselves.
> Here's a 15yo uncontrolled epidemiological study of acne, that blames everything on diet, go forth and treat your own skin conditions!
The paper is more restrained than that, but that's not how people interpret it. Problem solved. Eat like a Bantu.
Science would use this as bearing for a hypothesis to do an single-factor studies.
It's not because you are smart that you can't be ignorant of certain things at the same time. Even smart people can be fooled about stuff they are not familiar with. It's like trusting blindly the stories on your newspaper.
Check it out, this is happening. They are doing many crowdsourced analysis, the most prominent being a 30-day carnivore diet protocol: eat meat, drink water.
I have the same reaction to some of the posts on longevity research.
As far as I can tell the paper only talks about high insulin loads and refined sugars for etiology? Then again I might have missed something? Seriously, I'm in no way competent to read these papers but all I could see were mentions of insulin spikes and such. Could someone ELI5 what I'm missing?
A couple of friends of mine also cured a candida infection by avoiding carbs. So our diet might play a role.
Eating a large bar of dark chocolate should differentiate, purely in the interests of science of course.
The surplus sugar serves as a substrate to allow candida to thrive, not to mention a myriad of other maladies.
I'll take the occasional zit and cover it up with concealer, thank you very much.
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
― Henry David Thoreau,
"Acne vulgaris exists predominately in Western populations" or "Acne vulgaris mostly exists in Western Populations" would make it clearer.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting-effects-...
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/saving-lives-by-treating-ac...
But all the dermatologists she saw as a teen and young adult... always ridiculed this and insisted it had nothing to do with diet.
I wonder if acne can't have the same cause.
I still don't get any pimples even after going back to normal lotion but around Halloween I always get a pimple or two because of all the candy.
Really, I'd be very surprised if the microbiome wasn't involved somehow.
Read Weston A. Price's, 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration'
started shaving with a safety razor, helped quite a bit.
vs 5 blade massacre
So I do believe it's the coffee. Also for some reason, Kona Coffee make my acne even 2x worse than say columbia, etc.
HN policy is not to change the title which is "Acne Vulgaris - A Disease of Western Civilization"
For example, many Japanese suffer very bad acne through adolescence and young adulthood. In one study, nearly 60% of the teenagers had acne and many "had seborrhea and a family history of acne." [0] Indeed, even the most basic web search for "acne vulgaris in Japan" yields plenty of results to studies and treatments. (The study linked in the OP does mention Okinawa, whose relationship to Japan is complicated, as having practically zero incidence of acne vulgaris.)
In any case, given the current and historical prevalence of acne in Japan and the assertions of the study in the OP, would Japan be considered Western or is it a condition of urbanization and the health effects due to environment and diet?
Perhaps the word "Western" confounds easy interpretation of this study because it's actually a proxy for "outside Papua New Guinea".
[0] https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/dermatol/111/9/111_1347...
EDIT: clarify source of reference to Okinawa.
That's not anywhere close to all non-Western populations!
It's highly misleading, because my Taiwanese girlfriend has acne (worse than mine, and she's over age 30).
She probably has some Dutch blood in her from 400 years ago (her mum is from Tainan, and the light brown hair, double eyelids, and larger cleavage are probably a result of that too).
What the article is suggesting is that if that contact hadn't happened 400 years ago, she wouldn't have acne. Malicious propagandists could easily exaggerate that to blame Western civilisation for their ills, which I think is divisive.
The real research has shown a statistical correlation within a small sample size. That doesn't imply causation, or give any guidance on how to manage or mitigate the effects.
If future children getting acne is really your major worry about choosing a partner, the research might be of interest to you, but it fails to emphasise that even connections in the distant past can have an effect, and rejecting Westerners is not a suitable solution.
I also learned recently that sebum production -- and inflammation -- are both complex mechanisms. As with most regulatory systems I wouldn't be surprised if they were linked in some way. But obviously I don't want to claim this in some hand-wavy way. Can you share any reading material you found when exploring the topic?
I have recently started Spironolactone for various PCOS symptoms, including acne vulgaris, so it's of interest to me
The speculation is that low-glycemic load diets are related, possibly through insulin sensitivity/resistance. So probably an industrialized Chinese diet with a relatively high proportion of refined rice (or other grains) is also prone to acne.
I'd say there are plenty of western/Western attributes that could have a cumulative (?) impact.
How is the claim possibly true? Do they mean something other than what "non-Westerners" means literally? It happens e.g. in the middle-east too and I don't imagine that's an exception. I thought it was a pretty common human phenomenon.
