Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

[komencanto]

Acne for many reasons makes it incredibly suseptable to nonsence treatments, supersitions and such.

It is very difficult to tell what is effecting acne or track it effectively due to it´s randomness. If someone breaks out at any given point they could potentially blame it on anything they did or ate in the last few days. Most people with acne get their own fixations about things they do which causes their acne, when 95% of the time it is nothing.

For this reason, claims such as dirt, chocolate, nuts, exercise, sun, milk etc ad infinitum tend to get the blame.

In almost all of the large proper tests (as opposed to endless anecdotes), food and acne seems to have no positive relationship, but the myth continues everywhere.

Furthermore, the very harsh phychological effect acne has on a person leads them to obsess about it and fake control with their own personal (usually useless) methods to control it and also makes it very difficult for anyone with it to judge the state of their own skin and effectiveness of what they are doing.

In any case, I digress and cut to the chase. I just read this at the forums of www.acne.org and responded as such. See if you spotted the same errors that I did!

She said:

So .......after walking around with severly infected, acne prone skin for years,
And being aware of the toxins in most skincare products (and foods) from day one, my skin seems to be cooperating nicely. my discovery?

TEA TREE products . they are available in many natural skin care stores (the most popular of which is The Body Shop...BUT I AM SURE OTHER PLACES HAVE THEM)
I am not sure how well this may work with everyone's skin type but it balanced out my pH wonderfully. And I have come to the conclusion that i am not so bad lookin'

Pros of tea tree oils and cleasers:
1) has traditionally been used in malaysia for healing minor scrapes and insect bites (so imagine what it'll do to a zit)
2) everything in it is good for you (no medications, no chemicals)
3) works for even those with hypersensitive skin
4) Gets rid of stuff you didnt even know was there... without irritation
5) tones to remove 'once upon a time' blackheads/minor scars
6) Has a peculiar/natural smell

Cons of tea tree oils and cleansers
1) may cost a bit more
2)Has a peculiar/natural smell

What i find puzzling is that it is not marketed as an acne treatment miracle but just as a normal overall good skin care common sense product. wheeeeeeeee
So I recommend it to anyone who is frustrated or suspiscious of the more 'chemically' kinds of treatment.

as with anything good ...i takes a bit more time for results (but by the end of a week you should be noticing results)

I said:
I´m sorry, but whenever I start reading this stuff about chemicals and toxins and such my bull radar starts going off big time.
What are these toxins in acne medications and foods you are talking about?
What makes you think they cause acne?
Acne is caused by blocked pores, building up oil secretions and the bacteria that grow in them. Obviously you want to have clean skin, but thats not because of toxins, it´s to remove things which can clog pores.

TTO though is certainly a lower level treatment for acne, but isn´t going to work for people with more seroius acne. However:

"1) has traditionally been used in malaysia for healing minor scrapes and insect bites (so imagine what it'll do to a zit)"

Simply because something is traditional doesn´t make it good. Also, a zit requires something different from an insect bite or a scrape, so something that is effective for 1 won´t nesecerily be effective in the other.

"2) everything in it is good for you (no medications, no chemicals)"

Obviously it is a medication because you are using as one. TTO IS a chemical, everything we see around us is a chemical (except pure elements). Perhaps you mean this is a chemical that occurs naturally in nature, but that isn´t much of a point, because many of these "natural" chemicals are dangerous anyway.

"4) Gets rid of stuff you didnt even know was there... without irritation"

Such as??

"What i find puzzling is that it is not marketed as an acne treatment miracle but just as a normal overall good skin care common sense product. wheeeeeeeee
So I recommend it to anyone who is frustrated or suspiscious of the more 'chemically' kinds of treatment."

Probably because it is generally good for the skin, but not a highly effective acne treatment. What chemicals are you suspicious of? I can find you a thread way back talking about how safe BP is and that it is filtered quickly out of the system and converted to a harmless chemical if you want to read up.

"I am not sure how well this may work with everyone's skin type but it balanced out my pH wonderfully. And I have come to the conclusion that i am not so bad lookin' "

Great for you! I am curious to know how you know something is balancing out your pH? How do you measure you pH? I have never heard of this before.

Welcome here, I hope we can help you beat your acne, just remember not to believe everything the "chemical scaremongers" tell you =D

If it weren´t for modern chemistry and chemicals we wouldn´t have the treatments which have helped hundreds of us here on these boards and everywhere!


There you go, skepticism in action... I think =)

 

[mummymonkey]

Spooky!
I did a search a few hours back on tea tree oil and melaleuca (no hits) as I wanted more info on a chemical cure all called Melafix that everybody is raving about in the fish-keeping world.
Google provided a couple of studies on nail fungus and acne which seemed to support some anti-fungul and anti-bacterial effect. Nothing concrete and I was surprised they were claiming to have carried out a double blind test as the stuff absolutely reeks.

 

[BTox]

Tea tree oil does have antibacterial properties and may be of some value in treating acne, although I assume prescription products specifically formulated for this condition do a better job.

 

[volant]

Likely someone will reply with "scientific reports" from some webpage, and go on and on about natural stuff. As a member of that board(under volant), I can tell you those people are desperate to get rid of their acne. But, for some reason, a lot of them don't want to go on accutane, minocyclyne, or another well established treatment(like BP). If you have been reading the board long enough, you may remember the XIAN crap.

 

[geni]

I just hope that it will go away eveturaly

 

[Eos of the Eons]

lessee.

I've tried the main ingredient in many expensive mail order stuff-benzoyl peroxide.

Works best so far, and you can get it cheap at any drug store. I buy mine at Walmart. Make sure you use a water based moisturizer after you apply it.

Toothpaste dabbed on before you go to bed can shrink zits fast.

Guys can find moisturizers without scents in drug stores.
If you keep your skin hydrated, then you'll produce less oil.

 

[Suggestologist]

For this reason, claims such as dirt, chocolate, nuts, exercise, sun, milk etc ad infinitum tend to get the blame.

In almost all of the large proper tests (as opposed to endless anecdotes), food and acne seems to have no positive relationship, but the myth continues everywhere.

I'd actually be surprised if food had no effect on acne. Remember that your sweat contains within it remnants of your diet. If you eat a lot of strawberries, your sweat will smell of strawberries. If you eat a lot of garlic, your sweat will smell of garlic, etc. From that perspective, it would seem likely that SOME people may have skin reactions to some foods that are reflected when they sweat out the foods. And since sweat comes out of the pores, where acne happens, it seems likely that what you eat impacts on what happens in your pores.

 

[mstricky]

We are what we eat!
People with acne should have a high in zinc diet ...i.e. shellfish, lean meat, chicken, nuts. Fresh fruit and veg for vitamin c. Cut down on chocs and sweets (candy) highly salted snacks or added sugar

 

[komencanto]

For those who think that chocolate or indeed other foods cause acne in general across all people (some do experience this effect with allergies, to be sure), heres something to chew on =)
Section from "The Acne Cure" By Terry Dubrow:

"General Myths about Acne

Eating Chocolate Causes Acne

In our still (at least distantly) Puritan society, all pleasures, certainly uncluding masturbation and chocolate, are prone to be considered somehow "wicked", or at least so self-indulgent that they are bound to lead to some sort of punishment. In thecase of chocolate, the punishment as "everyone knows" is the it causes acne.
This is wrong. In their book Skin Deep, Drs. Turkington and Dover wrote, "In one study, 65 people ate chocolate bars every day for a month, but although the bars contained 10 times the normal amount of chocolate, the subjects experienced no worsening of blemishes." And researchers in the University of Pennsylvania fed 50 teenagers with acne a pound of chocolate a day. The result was that the acne or 46 of them remained unchanged, two got worse, and two got better. (There is no mention in this research of the impact of the intake of a pound of chocolate a day on any other aspect of the teenagers´health, but we do not recommend it!)
The fact is, there is nohting in chocolate that has any direct effect on acne.
However, this is where the naguc if cirrekatuibm tgat usm twi tgubgs gaooebubg at the same time, but not related to eah other, rears its head. Over and over again, we all seem to make the mistake of assuming that where there is a clear correlation, there must be a cause and a direct effect.
For example, in a study conducted in the 1970s by the Helena Rubenstein cosmetic company, researchers fuond that when they changed the package but not the content of one skin treatment cream, between 10 and 20 percent of its purchasers felt that the "new" products caused their skin to break out. This finding is in line with the experience of most inductry experts. The reason is that at any moment, between 10 and 20 percent of women suffer from a new outbreak of some form of acne, minor skin rash, or blemish. When that happens routinely, the women ignore it, ascribing it tot heir menstrual cycles, something they ate, or perhaps to a particularly stressful event. But if, immediately before the breakout, they used a "new" cosmetic cream, it is that product that gets the blame. A correlation is seen a as a causative event.
Taken to an extreme, you can find some strange facts that are proven by correlations. For example, for many years, there was a statistically significant correlation between the number of babies born in Holland and the number of storks in that country. See, we told you so!
In the case of chocolate eating, there are threee correlations that may play a role in fostering the erroneous belief that the confection leads to acne.
1 Teenagers are renowned for going on chocolate eating binges. At the same time, they often suffer from outbreaks of acne. If one of thsose out breaks ..."

Sorry, gotta stop typing and od something else, I´ll write the rest up soon.

 

[Rolfe]

You are so right about the nightmare part.

One of my first run-ins with a homoeopathic colleague was with a guy who lamented that his acne hadn't responded to anything the dermatologists prescribed, not even roaccutane. Then when he was 29 he went to a homoeopath and was instantly cured! He was convinced that if only he'd seen the homoeopath sooner he would have got rid of the problem before all the keloid scars and so on appeared, and in his first telling of the tale said that he was quite sure it wasn't coincidence. He was convinced the homoepath had a certain cure which the dermatologists wouldn't investigate, and this had led him to go on to use homoeopathy on his own patients.

Well, I had the opposite tale to tell. My parents took me to a homoeopath for my acne when I was about 14. No use at all. I think both I and my mother realised very quickly that it was a pile of nonsense, actually. I didn't have much better luck with the dermatologists either (though roaccutane wasn't available at that time), and my acne pretty much faded away on its own by the time I was about 25.

When I commented to my colleague that it was almost unheard-of to see a person over 30 with florid acne, and that he had been unlucky not to get the spontaneous clear-up until 29, he just wouldn't listen. He didn't even seem to know the basic cause (sensitivity of the skin to testosterone), and went rabbiting on about stress causing it. The fact that homoeopathy hadn't made a blind bit of difference to my 14-year-old acne didn't change his mind in the slightest - positive correlations are always jumped on, and negative ones don't count for some reason.

It's like the wart cures. Viral warts are very stubborn for quite a long time sometimes, then the immune system finally gets the message and they pretty well drop off overnight. Whatever powerful charm was being used at that moment gets the credit.

Edited to add: My mother kept telling me not to eat sweets as that would make the acne worse, but I just didn't believe her - I saw no evidence to indicate that was true, and went right on eating chocolate when I fancied it. And the medics sent me to get bathed with ultraviolet rays, and I'm sure in retrospect that only helped because the skin looked better with a tan. Hey, if I get skin cancer, do you think I'll be able to sue?

Am I unusual in feeling that people who do sensible things which just happen not to be any real use shouldn't be criticised (so long as they quit with the useless advice when the evidence is available), but that people who peddle shaken-up water with therapeutic claims should be tarred and feathered?

Rolfe.

 

[BTox]

Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

I'd actually be surprised if food had no effect on acne. Remember that your sweat contains within it remnants of your diet. If you eat a lot of strawberries, your sweat will smell of strawberries. If you eat a lot of garlic, your sweat will smell of garlic, etc. From that perspective, it would seem likely that SOME people may have skin reactions to some foods that are reflected when they sweat out the foods. And since sweat comes out of the pores, where acne happens, it seems likely that what you eat impacts on what happens in your pores.

Never heard of anyone sweating the smell of strawberries. In any event, this is fanciful thinking, and nothing to do with acne.

 

[Suggestologist]

Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

Never heard of anyone sweating the smell of strawberries. In any event, this is fanciful thinking, and nothing to do with acne.

Fanciful thinking? I challenge you to directly experiment for yourself: Buy a can of minced garlic: Eat two ounces a day for one week. Go exercise. Smell your sweat.

 

[BTox]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

Fanciful thinking? I challenge you to directly experiment for yourself: Buy a can of minced garlic: Eat two ounces a day for one week. Go exercise. Smell your sweat.

I wasn't questioning the smell of garlic in sweat, just strawberries. I've eaten large quantities of them and other fruits, never noticed any sweat odor. The fanciful thinking was in reference to food having an effect on acne via sweat.

 

[Suggestologist]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

I wasn't questioning the smell of garlic in sweat, just strawberries. I've eaten large quantities of them and other fruits, never noticed any sweat odor. The fanciful thinking was in reference to food having an effect on acne via sweat.

You'd probably have to eat around 5lb of strawberries a day for several days. Do you disagree that sweat has an impact on acne? Or just that the excretory residues in sweat don't?

 

[Yahweh]

You can rid yourself of acne with a good fire heated straight razor. Problem solved.

 

[Yahweh]

You can rid yourself of acne with a good fire heated straight razor. Problem solved.

Note: The above is subtle Yahweh humor, do not take this advice.

 

[BTox]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

You'd probably have to eat around 5lb of strawberries a day for several days. Do you disagree that sweat has an impact on acne? Or just that the excretory residues in sweat don't?

I disagree that food residues in sweat, such as VSCs from garlic, have any influence on acne.

 

[Suggestologist]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

I disagree that food residues in sweat, such as VSCs from garlic, have any influence on acne.

It does influence some people's acne; those with skin alergies to the specific food.

 

[BTox]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

It does influence some people's acne; those with skin alergies to the specific food.

If someone has a true food allergy the effect of that food on their acne would be the least of their worries.

 

[Suggestologist]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Acne is a skeptics nightmare...

If someone has a true food allergy the effect of that food on their acne would be the least of their worries.

Yeah, "true" allergies vary in degree of impact.

While reviewing various web-sites about this topic, I generally found two types of explanation: One was that eating chocolate and oily foods does not cause acne and neither does any food (for any person). Two was that while eating chocolate and oily foods does not cause acne, for individuals some foods do impact acne. I would tend to go with the second.

Other sites mention that milk may increase testosterone levels, and testosterone increases acne activity. I don't know if that's correct (that milk increases testosterone), but it would make sense that if foods increase testosterone that one might want to cut back.

What seems to be the case is that there have been a lot of studies about the effect of Chocoloate and Potato Chips on acne. I don't understand how people generalize from this that ALL foods have no effect on acne for ALL people.

There's a clear cause-effect relationship between what one eats and what subsequently happens at the pores. To say that food has no effect on acne at the pores for at least some people seems wrong on the face of this relationship. I'm not saying that it's impossible that there is no effect -- just that there is no reason to ignore the possibility for the individual.

I suppose that the individual might keep a daily food & acne diary to track the possibility.