A spot of bother

Acne is often blamed on chocolate, but it's carbohydrates that are the guilty ones, says Dr John Briffa

Acne is generally thought of as an adolescent affliction, although my experience suggests otherwise. In my practice, I see a regular stream of individuals who continue to suffer from 'bad skin' long after puberty. In fact, statistics show that more than one in two women and 40 per cent of men over 25 have some acne, and for a few this problem persists into middle age. Traditional nutritional advice is to avoid fatty food, especially chocolate. However, recent evidence suggests it is not fat but another commonly found ingredient in chockie bars that incites the skin to break out.

Clues to the causes of acne may be found by comparing the nutritional habits of different populations. Researchers looked at the diets and dermatological health of two indigenous populations: the Kitavan islanders from Papua New Guinea and the Aché hunter-gatherers from Paraguay. While the Kitavans subsist mainly on fruit, vegetables, fish and coconut, the Aché diet is comprised almost entirely of wild, foraged-for and locally cultivated foods. Intriguingly, the prevalence of acne in both these groups eating essentially natural foods was found to be nil. This is in stark contrast to the high rates of acne seen in industrialised nations.

Full article: The Observer

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Plague of pimples blamed on bread

Eating too much refined bread and cereal, rather than chocolate and greasy foods, may be the culprit behind the pimples that plague many a youngster.

That is the theory of a team led by Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Highly processed breads and cereals are easily digested. The resulting flood of sugars makes the body produce high levels of insulin and insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones. These encourage pores in the skin to ooze large amounts of sebum, the greasy goop that acne-promoting bacteria love. IGF-1 also encourages skin cells called keratinocytes to multiply, a hallmark of acne, the team say in a paper that will appear in the December issue of Archives of Dermatology.

Full article: New Scientist

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