Acne

It must be true. Shmoo must really be hitting his preteens, because now he has zits. Last night he pointed to the big red blotches on his chin and asked me, "What is this?" My little baby!! Next thing you know he'll be going on dates and asking to borrow the car...

I've dealt with acne my entire adult life (they all told me I'd grow out of it, the liars). And although acne has been linked to milk and dairy products in several studies, going vegan did not clear up my skin at all.

Of course, although it didn't contain dairy, my early vegan diet did include daily servings of things like soda, chips, candy, and french fries.

When I learned about nutrient-density and started following Eat To Live, things changed. I cleared sugar, white flour, and oil out of my diet and added more fruits and vegetables, and within two to three weeks my acne had disappeared. At first I didn't know what to make of it. Each morning I would stare intently into the bathroom mirror, ready to do battle with my face, and would find that I had nothing to fight. I would stand back and gape at myself. No zits!

Of course, I'll always have acne scars and pores you can see across the room (along with wrinkles now, how lovely), but for the first time in my adult life I have clear skin. The nasty bumps return and flare up all along my chin and jawline within two to three weeks of bringing sweets back into my diet. (I wish I could say one experience of this was enough to keep me on the wagon forever, but I must admit I've fallen off a few times now, always with the same results.)

Then last week I discovered that I'm not alone. Here's the passage I read in Anticancer:

"When [Loren Cordain, PhD] was told that certain population groups whose way of life is very different from ours had no experience of acne (which is caused by an inflammation of the epidermis, among other mechanisms), he wanted to find out how this could occur...Cordain accompanied a team of dermatologists to examine the skin of 1,200 adolescents cut off from the rest of the world in the Kitavan Islands of New Guinea, and 130 Ache Indians living in isolation in Paraguay. In these two groups they found no trace whatsoever of acne. In their article in Archives of Dermatology, the researchers attributed their amazing discovery to the adolescents' nutrition. The diets of these contemporary sheltered groups resemble those of our distant ancestors: no refined sugar or white flour, thus no peaks of insulin or IGF in the blood.

"In Australia, researchers convinced Western adolescents to try a diet restricting sugar and white flour for three months. In a few weeks, their insulin and IGF levels diminished. So did their acne."

Think this information will be enough to convince shmoo to go sugar-free? I doubt it. That monkey just don't let go. But maybe when he gets interested in girls...