There is a lot of buzzes whether your diet can improve or worsen your acne. The short answer to this is yes. It does affect your acne and it affects it a lot. So, what are the foods that cause acne?
NOTE: Eating these foods also cause deficiencies in essential minerals, such as Zinc and others.
First a few words about diet and acne.
Remember all those studies that show no correlation between chocolate consumption and acne. They are true, BUT, before you go to your fridge and have your cheesecake vanished consider this let’s have a closer look. Most of these studies don’t take into account the sweeteners and other chemicals that are being put on every chocolate we eat today.
On these studies the test is for pure chocolate, 100%, this kind of chocolate is bitter.* It does not taste very good. What makes all these chocolates we eat today taste sweet is sugar and other artificial sweeteners/taste enhancers.
Guess what, these do affect your health, your skin and ultimately your acne. I will write about how destructive the sugar is for your overall health and how bad it is for your acne in a later post. For now as a rule of the thumb just REMOVE it from your diet and substitute sweets with fruits.
We are what we eat.
How does your everyday diet impacts your acne? It affects it in every way. Your diet affects your body and your brain, literally, you are what you eat. If you eat junk you will be/become a junk body and brain. In this case, acne will be the last thing that you should be worried about.
Famous Junk
Let’s have a look at some junk food facts that you may or may not know.
First of all the common ground for all junk foods is this one below, this is the only rule for a large corporation when it comes to food production:
- Do anything that will hook the consumer and won’t cause him immediate health problems that could be correlated easily with our product.
And for this reason, most products use three basic hooks that exploit the way our taste functions. These are:
- Sweetness
- Saltness
- Fattiness
Unfortunately, consumers prefer these products and so companies are forced to use these hooks more and more in order to keep up with the competition. For this reason, if you go to a local food store and look the ingredients you will see sugar almost everywhere and if it is not sugar it will be something else, aspartame or fructose corn syrup or whatever. Now if you consume these products on daily basis, you will never get rid of acne let alone that you will develop a junk body and brain which means that you will have other major health problems that will be irreversible (Diabetes, Cancer, etc..). So instead of complaining about your acne, you should say thank you because this is how your body communicates to you that some pretty serious damage is going on here and you instead of healing, you throw in more and more garbage just to make the situation worse. Before you start treating your acne with creams, pills, and remedies you should make sure that your diet is balanced and that your organism is in good shape. After that, you can proceed with treatments.
Here is a quick list of some well-known junk food that hit ALL of the above three hooks and you must stay away from:
- McDonald’s and other Major Food Chains Stores like them (This includes Starbucks)
- Pizzas and some pasta as well.
- Colas and other mass consumption beverages.
- Other food products similar to the above and targeted to the above audience.
Speaking for someone who consumes the above products, he has desensitized his taste receptors so much that everything else seems without taste. This means that everything else(tasteful) he consumes has a very high probability of being junk too. The good news for this guy is that tongue receptors are being “refreshed” every week so if he has the determination for one or two months he can reverse these situations and have his sense of taste back to normal. For me, it was about one and a half month before I really started to see the difference in the sense of my taste.
But it is not only your sense of taste that your diet affects. As humans, we have nutritional needs that must be fulfilled in order for someone to be healthy. We need vitamins and other minerals.
Unfortunately, the food industry is not interested in them because they don’t hook the consumer. They don’t bring in profits. Or to put it better, good foods bring no good profits for the companies who produce them. So why produce them in the first place?
These foods then, not only cause damage but they completely lack any nutritional value that any human being needs. On the other hand they give you massive amounts of calories, so your body is fooled into believing that it is fed well, but in reality, it is” starving” for nutrients. If you consume such kind of food you should stop it as fast as possible, it destroys your health and makes your acne situation, whatever that is worse. Plus with these foods, you get fat too.
Stop eating homemade junk!
Let’s go a little more in-depth about the modern, western civilization eating habits. Junk food is so ingrained in our eating habits that we are not even aware of it. Home food, the food you cook at home can be junk too. When you prepare your meal you should have this Number One rule in your mind:
- What is the nutritional value of the food? Is there any? Does it contain harmful ingredients? If it has minor nutritional value and/or has harmful ingredients then it should not be in your dish.
Let’s see a list of common foods that are harmful because of HOW they are produced.
- Milk and everything produced by it.
- Non-Grass-Fed Meat.
- Wheat, Corn and everything produced by them.
- Vegetables.
- Fish.
- Fruit.
The next thing you want to do is search your food supply and know how your food ends up on your plate, from born to death, to your plate, learn everything. Is the burger you eat made from a wild cow, or is it from a sick cow full of antibiotics and artificial hormones that produce more milk? You might enjoy this documentary while eating it.
As I said before we are what we eat if you eat the above crap learn to live with acne. Your body will never be in a situation to handle this, don’t get fooled by your friends who look healthy and eat the same crap. They have different genetic markup, their body responds differently to junk food, their bad eating habits will show up eventually and won’t be nice. So protect yourself, your family and your friends. Educate yourself on the topic, know what you eat!
* This is no conspiracy theory that some bad people are trying to misinform the public, it is common sense, when you check for correlation of chocolate with acne, you test chocolate not sugar.
