Doctors have been saying for years that sugar won’t lead to acne breakouts. Studies show they may be wrong.
Researches studied the impact of glycemic index (GI) on cystic acne. Glycemic index shows how quickly the sugars from a food enters the bloodstream. Higher the glycemic index the faster the glucose is soaked up.
The researches compared the severity of acne between people who eat normal (high GI) diet and those eating a higher protein (low GI) diet. This study was published at a famous medical journal. And what did the study find? Folks who ate the low GI eating plan had far fewer pimples than those on the more normal (Western style) diet. Do I have to say it? Sugar provokes acne.
How is it possible for carbohydrates to lead to pimples?
It comes down to how your body regulates blood sugar levels Glucose for your body is like gasoline for your car. Your body needs the right about of blood sugar to function properly. That’s why it’s crucial to maintain constant blood sugar levels, and your body has a robust method for carrying out just this.
After a meal, blood glucose levels start rising. Your system reacts by releasing insulin, which is a hormone that escorts sugar from your blood into the cells and therefore lowers blood glucose levels. Along with insulin the body also releases other hormones.
The problem is that insulin along with the other hormones also have an effect on your skin. The bottom line is they increase sebum production and may lead to blocked skin pores. How this happens is discussed in more detail at blood sugar levels and acne page.
In essence the more your blood sugar levels change the more of these types of acne causing hormones your system produces and the more likely you are to wake up with more acne.
And what causes blood sugar levels to fluctuate? Eating sugars, white carbs and other foodstuff with large glycemic index is perhaps the greatest factor. But the impact isn’t limited to diet. Lack of exercise, carrying excess fat and shortage of sleep can make it harder for your body to keep stable blood glucose levels.
So what this comes down to is, certainly, sugars cause acne breakouts, but merely avoiding sweets may well not by enough to remedy cystic acne. If you are past your teen years and have suffered from acne for many several years, curing acne breakouts probably requires holistic effort to improve your wellness.
Posted by Seppo, filed under diet. Date: March 31, 2010, 10:13 am |No Comments »
Several courses of Accutane, all OTC treatments you can name, master cleanse many times. He eats healthy. Still his skin looks horrible.
Then he goes to Puerto Rico for 2 months, smokes like a chimney and eats greasy food. Yet his skin never looked better.
What’s going on here? Doesn’t this prove diet has no effect on his skin?
In case you are wondering. Michael is a member at Clear Skin Space, where we had this discussion.
Michael’s case is interesting because it shows that getting clear doesn’t always make sense… or does it? So what can we learn from this? If you are in a similar situation should you throw salad to the wind and eat whatever you want?
No. Not if you want permanently clear skin, anyway.
Food affects your skin in two ways. Some foods trigger a breakout soon after you eat them; often within a day or two. I call these ‘trigger foods’. This is often because you are sensitive to that particular food, or the food is otherwise inflammatory.
These foods are easy to spot, and their relationship to your skin is easy to understand.
However food also affects acne indirectly. This is where people get confused.
Foods can either contribute to your or they can take away from your health. If your health suffers from your diet and lifestyle choices it always means more inflammation in your body. And more inflammation means more acne - to those who are prone to it.
Let’s get back to Michael.
We can conclude that the foods he ate in Puerto Rico didn’t trigger acne. But it would be quite foolish to say foods have no effect on his health. And because foods he eat affect his health, they also affect the health of his skin - even if the effect is indirect and shows only after a long time.
But this doesn’t make any sense. Why did his skin get better in Puerto Rico?
Who knows. We can rarely reduce these things to one or two factors. Perhaps his body needed sunlight and fresh air more than anything. Or perhaps in that tropical paradise he was happier and less stressed. Perhaps the foods he ate back home contained some ingredient he was sensitive to, and this ingredient was not present in the foods he ate in Puerto Rico.
This brings us to the next concept many acne victims struggle with.
Your health is only as strong as its weakest link.
Unfortunately 90% of all the questions I get have something to do with diet. Is this food good? Will this make me breakout? Is this food safe to eat?
Diet is the only thing many acne victims can wrap their heads around. They have overblown the importance of diet in getting clear.
Sure it’s important to watch what you eat, but diet is just one of the elements of health. You have to make sure you exercise, sleep well, get some sunlight and fresh air, and remain positive.
Diet is no more important than the other elements.
Let me finish this by telling you the BIG SECRET to clear skin.
I get a certain amount of hate mail. For whatever reason some people feel compelled to tell me I’m a greedy and evil bastard for withholding the secret to clear skin. I should go and yell it off the mountaintop, they say.
Since there are no mountaintops nearby, and it can get a bit cold in those altitudes, I’m just going to yell it off here.
So here it is. The ’secret’ three-step formula for clear skin.
Put all the elements of health in place. This means finding a diet that works for YOU, and making sure all the elements of health are balanced.
Avoid trigger foods and substances you are sensitive to or that in some other way trigger a breakout.
Sit tight and allow the healing process to unfold.
There you have it. That is, honest to God, the big NON-secret to clear skin. There is nothing more to it.
Now just go do it.
And while you are at it, go grab a copy of Clear for Life to make me happy
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Your friends see your new diet as an open seasons for nasty jokes? Perhaps you could have written this email.
Just as a side note, when you do decide to go out with friends, do you find it easier to cheat / enjoy your food (and not invoke cognitive dissonance) or do you have to explain your life philosophy of being a raw vegan? Personally, my friends do not want to hear such nonsense and I get so much crap everyday for how I eat but oh well!
I don’t have any rules regarding my diet, so the concept of cheating on my diet doesn’t make any sense in my case.
Instead of rules I have preferences. Those preferences change depending on the situation I’m in and what I want to achieve (my goals). Often they are related to health, but not always. When I go out with my friends I tend to focus more on just having a good time.
So I try to use diet to my benefit without letting it rule my life.
Perhaps as a consequence my friends never give me grief about my diet. They know that I eat in a week more fruits than they probably eat in a year, but they hardly ever mention it. Sometimes they are a bit curious and ask question (usually arising out of dietary ignorance), but they do so out of curiosity.
I also never bring up my diet. Sometimes they want to eat in a place I just don’t want to eat (such as McDonald’s). In those cases I tell them ‘I can’t eat that crap, let’s go somewhere else’. I just tell them it’s bad for my skin/health and makes me feel terrible afterwards without going into ‘I’m a raw vegan and can’t eat that’ nonsense.
I don’t think your friends intentionally want to see you fail in your diet. At least if you don’t make an issue out of it. They probably do give you grief about it if you let your diet come in between you and your friends. If they notice that it stops you from going out and having fun with them.
So don’t let your diet rule over your entire life. Remember that being happy is at least as important as eating healthy. In most cases you can still make reasonable food choices even when eating out with your buddies. As a guy, just don’t order a salad if your buddies have big burgers. That’s just asking for trouble
Finally talk to your friends. I’m sure they understand you don’t want to eat at McDonald’s because of your skin.
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Posted by Seppo, filed under diet, tips. Date: January 26, 2009, 7:58 am |2 Comments »
I decided to come clean and unloaded everything from my fridge and cupboards on my bed. Here’s what it looks like:
So let’s see what we have:
Tons of bananas
Mangoes
Oranges
Pineapple
Watermelon
Peaches, Asian variety
A dragon fruit
Few bags of greens
Tomatoes, cucumbers and few other vegetables
At any given day those make up for the majority of my diet; though the selection of fruits changes depending on availability, season and whatever I happen to fancy.
Most of that will be gone in the next two to three days.
What’s missing from the picture are the few kilos of frozen berries occupying my freezer.
Let’s move to the stuff I eat less frequently:
Some dried fruits, occasionally snack with these
Tuna, sometimes add it to salads
Olives, again for salads
Mix of sesame seeds and seaweed, excellent stuff to sprinkle on salads
Salad dressing
Bottle of lemon juice
Finally we have the rest
Instant coffee, I know it tastes horrible and is very bad for your health, but what can I say I’m hooked on coffee and have no plans to quit it.
Green tea and herbal teas
Natural and unsweetened cocoa, sometimes drink this in the evenings
Salt, baking soda and honey, bought them to try some homemade skin care recipes but don’t eat them
Instant oats, unopened for the last few months and I doubt I’ll ever open it
That’s about. When I’m at home that’s what I eat.
I have to say that when I’m out I eat more ‘normal’ food, i.e. cooked food. I usually eat one cooked meal a day, usually Thai food since I’m in Thailand. Some days I’m 100% raw, aside from two cups of coffee.
If eating like this scares your socks off, don’t worry, you don’t have to go this far just to get clear. 50% raw and the rest from natural, whole foods should do the trick.
Just so you know, I just didn’t one day decide to eat like this. It has been a gradual transition to me. Now eating mostly raw is very natural for me. It makes me feel fantastic and I wouldn’t want to eat any other way.
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Posted by Seppo, filed under diet, tips. Date: January 26, 2009, 6:44 am |13 Comments »
Good steak or a juice mango? That’s the question many acne victims face.
For clear skin and good health should you go low-carb or low-fat? Some people get clear with low-carb diets, some with low-fat diets. How is this possible, and why does it have to be so darn confusing?
Just few questions on Chris’s mind when he emailed me. You can get clear on either diet, and in this post I explain why. I also explain a serious short coming with low-carb diets; something you should keep in mind before trying them.
Let’s start with the original question from Chris.
This high fruit/carb/sugar (from fruit and veggies) especially in those green smoothies then, in regards to the high protein/fat argument, is a death drink.
I have read all your articles and blog entries, I get a good understanding on where you are coming from, but then again I see their point and am trying to link both arguments together, like an argumentative paper, to see why one side says “this” and the other says “that.” I’m trying to see which side is missing something, if they think they are. I know this is hard due to food being a “religion”, like you said, and what not. But I feel you have a good head on your shoulders and are honest.
Let’s see if we can’t clarify things a bit.
Diet wars: fat vs. carbs
In case you are not familiar with what I call the “diet wars” let me explain them briefly. Basically we have ‘carbs’ people fighting ‘fat’ people. People on the carb camp say eating too much fat causes insulin resistance, which that leads to all kinds of problems. People on the other side of the fence claim carbs spike blood sugar and levels, and that leads to insulin resistance.
So both sides agree that insulin resistance is the main problem and the solution is to keep blood sugar levels stable. Just the methods differ; low-fat diet vs. low-carb diet.
Let’s also acknowledge that people have gotten clear with low-carb diets and with low-fat diets. People on low-carb diets can have stable blood sugar levels, and the same can be said about low-fat diets.
So what gives? Does it even matter whether you eat low-carb or low-fat?
Understanding blood sugar controls unravels the mystery
Understanding how your body controls blood sugar levels unravels the confusion. The process works a bit differently for both diets.
In the case of low-fat (high-carb by definition) diets your body turns carbs into glucose and absorbs it directly from the digestive track. Glucose goes to bloodstream and from there insulin takes it to your cells. This is the most efficient route and the way your body was designed to work.
In a healthy individual eating a healthy diet this process works perfectly. Blood sugar levels remain stable. But insulin resistance changes things dramatically. Glucose cannot get from the bloodstream into the cells and blood sugar levels increase. This leads to high insulin levels and all sorts of problems low-carb books warn you about.
So carbs + insulin resistance = problem; carbs + no insulin resistance = no problem.
Now let’s look at low-carb diets and how they affect blood sugar levels.
Your body runs on sugar. That’s the fuel it prefers and, as a general rule, everything you eat gets converted to sugar, even the fats and the protein you eat. Since protein rarely makes up a significant portion of calories I’ll focus on fat here.
When you eat fat the body picks it up from the digestive track and the circulatory system (your blood and lymph) takes it to fat storages.
Think of those storages as a warehouse. As needed the liver converts fats into glucose, dumps it into the bloodstream and from there to your cells.
Your body actively manages this process. It monitors blood sugar levels and instructs the liver to convert just the right amount of fat into glucose. Going back to the warehouse analogy. As orders come in the warehouse manager ships just the right amount of material out, and at the right time.
Because your body manages this process you’ll get a steady drip of glucose into the bloodstream and your blood sugar levels remain stable.
Too much fat still leads to insulin resistance
At the first glance that looks like a great approach, but it has one major setback.
It does nothing to the root cause of the problem: insulin resistance.
While your blood sugar levels may remain steady on a low-carb diet you are still cannot handle carbs. I touched on this in an earlier blog post: Acne victims: To fruit or not to fruit?.
The concentration of glucose in the blood was consistently 1mmol/l higher in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet than in those on the normal diet throughout the 1 year study period. However, insulin levels continued to rise in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet. This suggests that insulin resistance progressively increased but there were compensatory mechanisms which kept the hyperglycaemia stable at 1mmol/l. When challenged with an intravenous glucose tolerance test, there was no compensation for the insulin resistance and there was a marked deterioration of glucose elimination.
OK, this is research done with mice. But does it apply to humans in real life. Take a look at these comments at a low-carb forum:
“when i sit down and have a nice two lb steak, and measure my blood sugar 2 hours later… since i am diabetic.. i notice that the number is around 85..if i eat any carbs my blood sugars go as high as 500.. steak.. its whats for dinner!!”
“I have severe reactive hypoglycemia. With protein and fat throughout the day, my blood sugars are nice and steady. I never spike and crash. If I ate too many carbs, however, I’d be having some severe episodes.”
“My mom’s diabetic, so she’s testing all the time… When she LC’s [low-carbs] all her numbers are under control… when she goes off plan, her numbers are haywire!
Likewise, just in my own personal experience… I have low blood sugar… if I eat a steak, I have even sustained energy and clear mental function… if I eat comparable carbs, it’s like I’m DRUNK I’m so lethargic and stupid!”
You can find several people at acne.org forums who have gotten clear with low-carb diets. The message from the is very clear. As long as they stay away from carbs they remain clear, but when they eat too many carbs they breakout.
Here’s an email I got from a customer. Before trying Clear for Life he had been on a low-carb diet.
Just got to say, you da man! I’m into my 4th week post paleo and my skin is doing very well. I haven’t kept to your diet and detox plan stringently, but am eating an abundance of organic fruits, greens, grains, tubers, and legumes while being very careful about my fat intake. Also maintaining a regular exercise and meditation routine while getting as much sunlight as I can manage working an office job during the rainy season in Seattle.
The first week on my diet I was quite amazed to eat levels of carbs that would have caused a carpet bombing of my face while on paleo. No such result.
Can you see a common pattern here? None of these people can eat carbs without severe blood sugar problems. Meaning they still have severe insulin resistance - just like the research done on mice said they would.
And what causes their insulin resistance? All the fat in their blood.
So while they may have their blood sugar levels and skin under control they’ve done nothing to the root cause. They simply manage symptoms and have pretty much doomed themselves into never eating carbs.
Low-carb agruments don’t square with reality
OK, I get that, but what about the arguments low-carb people say? That eating carbohydrates leads to spiking blood sugar levels and insulin resistance, and that the only way to avoid that is to avoid carbs.
One good thing that has come out of low-carb diets is that people are more conscious of eating refined sugar and carbs. Because those are bad for you, can spike your blood sugar levels, and lead to acne and other health problems.
But the argument fails miserably when applied to unrefined carbs; the things you find from whole foods. And I have to admire the low-carb people for persisting on their argument even though it flies on the face of reality.
Riddle me this. Most people outside the Western world eat a diet that’s high in carbs (Asians with their rice and South Americans with their corn). How is it there are very few fat people in these places and diabetes is almost unheard of, except in people who eat a more Western diet? According to the low-carb arguments these people should be obese, diabetic and pretty much dead by now.
The longest-lived people fill their plates with unrefined carbs
And if low-carb diet was the key to optimal health how is it possible that the people in the longest-lived cultures eat a high-carb diet?
Costa Rica’s longevity capital
A lot of physical labor still goes into food production there, from clearing fields to raise crops to picking fruit and grinding corn for tortillas, which is a great upper-body workout. In fact, people who live in this region have some of the best physical stamina in the world because they’re always on the move. People eat lots of corn, beans and squash, and there’s fresh fruit almost year-round.
The island of Okinawa in Japan is the home to the longest-lived people in the world. They eat plenty of rice, tofu and seafood. The longest-lived Americans are the Seventh-Day Adventists, many of which are vegetarians and have cut out most of the foods available on a low-carb diet.
These people wouldn’t live so long with raging blood sugar and insulin levels.
Then we have people who eat raw foods, the low-fat version. Most of them report dramatic improvements in health, energy levels and athletic performance. I’m one of them, and Clear for Life customers email me with similar stories every day.
I could go on and quote studies showing how low-fat, high-carb, high-fiber diet reverses insulin resistance, but I don’t think we need to go there.
In the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence I can’t put much weight on the low-carb arguments.
Let me say I’m not making a value judgment here, and at the same time wrap this up.
Whether you choose a low-card or a low-fat approach it’s possible to cure acne and live a healthy life. It’s just that the low-carb approach still leaves you with insulin resistance, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to take. Especially since you can get the same results with healthier diet that’s supported by both science and real life experience.
You are free to choose differently, but at least now you understand the whole story and can make a conscious choice.
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Posted by Seppo, filed under diet. Date: January 23, 2009, 9:46 am |11 Comments »
I do have one quick question for you….do you ever eat anything like a chocolate chip cookie, a piece of candy or a small piece of cake? I am not a big dessert eater but it would be nice to know that I can have a small treat once every couple of weeks or something. If you do eat those things ocassionally how often do you allow yourself to have them and do you alter your other eating for that day?
To answer your question, yes I occasionally eat those things. But I think you really want to know if it’s ok to do so.
I can’t give you a simple black and white answer to that. It depends on what you want.
Unlike many others who promote a strict dietary adherence I’m more flexible on this point.
Above all my advice is to make friends with your food. Your diet shouldn’t cause stress and neither should it make you feel deprived. I believe that both of those harm your health and skin more than occasionally treating yourself with ‘bad’ foods.
This means acknowledging that diet change can be a big thing, and that you may need to give yourself time to make the changes. Don’t push too much too quickly.
Your diet needs to be in sync with your life. For example I spend a lot of time at coffee shops, simply because they are convenient places to work. So it’s no surprise that I drink coffee. Quitting coffee and tea at the moment would be very hard. My life is just too structured around coffee shops. And I really don’t want to change this because I enjoy the freedom this gives me. So I think the benefits of coffee and the other things that come along with it outweigh the downsides of drinking coffee.
If you have similar obstacles to healthy eating acknowledge the fact and don’t push too hard against it. Take a look at your situation and figure out what’s the best you can at the moment. Then live by that. Don’t push yourself to go further than that or you’ll end up stressing yourself for no good reason. On the other hand keep it real. Don’t deceive yourself with this.
Making friends with your food also means keeping in mind what you want. Desire to simply remain in good health gives you much more flexibility than training for Olympic does, for example. Diet is a matter of cause and effect. If you are happy with your results then why would you change your diet? If you don’t like your results then consider making changes.
My diet is not optimal. It’s very good, but I still drink coffee and occasionally eat foods that are not good for me. But I’m happy where I’m at the moment and don’t see the need to make big changes.
As you can see it’s hard to give simple and definitive answers to diet questions. Right answer depends on so many things. But getting back to your question I don’t think such small treats hamper your efforts to cure acne too much.
Diet is an important part of healthy and curing acne, but you need to keep it in perspective. It’s just a part of the solution.
As long as you understand the elements of healthy diet and clear skin, such as presented in Clear for Life, and honestly do your best given your situation you should do fine.
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Posted by Seppo, filed under diet. Date: January 6, 2009, 7:57 am |No Comments »
“Help, I’m losing too much weight and my friends comment how skinny I look!”
Please cool down, you are not going to fade away : )
This is one of the most frequently asked questions I get from Clear for Life customers. Perhaps it’s on your mind also, so I wrote a detailed reply to it.
Let’s start with an ABC of body composition and weight control.
Three elements make up for your body weight: water, lean tissue and fat. Water makes up as much as 70% of our total body mass.
Water has many important functions in the body. One is that it’s used to dilute toxins to bring down their concentration to less harmful level.
When the body cannot eliminate all the toxins it has to store them. But it doesn’t store just the toxins, it also stores the water they are diluted in. Solution to pollution is dilution.
Once you stop putting toxins in the organs of elimination have a chance to catch up. The load of toxins in the body starts to go down. As the body gets rid of the toxins it also releases the extra water.
Any rapid weight loss is always water loss.
That’s one part of the weight loss issue.
Second, and this may make you a bit uncomfortable, nearly all of us are under muscled and over fat.
Here’s a quote from Dr. Graham:
“When thin people have a desire to gain weight, they usually fail to recognize that they need to gain muscle, not fat. Almost every client who has even come to me wanting to curtain their weight loss because they thought they were getting too ’skinny’ actually still needed to lose some fat…
One client, a high-end fashion model, came to me saying she would do whatever I suggested in order to extend her youthful beauty, but she could not afford to lose any more weight. She was long and lanky and looked skinny to be sure, but she was under muscled. When we measured her body fat, she was shocked to discover that it was almost 29% - at least 10% above what I would consider healthy. She did not need to lose weight; she needed to lose fat while gaining muscle.”
Dr. Graham
The 80/10/10 Diet
For most people it only looks like they have muscle because of water and fat. Water inflates their muscles. Within the muscles there’s also lots of fat, and there’s a padding of fat around the muscles.
Once the body starts to release water and fat it looks like our muscles are shrinking. But in reality we have only been stripped off our illusion of muscles. Perhaps for the first time we have to face the fact of how under muscled most of us really are.
Muscle loss happens only in two cases: you don’t use the muscles or you starve yourself. Starving is not an issue, because the body first burns off fat before using muscle for energy. If you purposefully leave yourself calorie-deficient for long periods of time (months) it may happen, but for the vast majority it’s not an issue.
So the only way you can lose muscle is not to use them. Use it or lose it. And as you start using them your muscles gain their size back quickly.
That’s another part to weight loss mystery.
As you can see it doesn’t really make sense to look at your weight and ’skinniness’ as an indicator of how well you are doing. Rather focus on how you are feeling. Do you still have energy? What about your athletic capabilities, are they still the same/improving/declining?
As long as you feel great and can perform athletically (the way you used to) you have nothing to worry about.
Initially, you may experience a drop in your athletic capabilities. That’s a result of detoxification.
Initially the body may break down more tissue than it can rebuild. So you may lose a little strength. That’s ok. It’s temporary and you will gain the ‘lost’ muscle back.
It doesn’t happen to everybody, but if it happens to you it’s important to be aware of it, and keep an eye on it. This ‘weak’ period should not last for more than a month or two. If it goes on for more than two months, you may have a problem with your diet.
With strength training you can minimize or completely avoid this weak period. I’ve noticed and heard from other people that by training your muscles you can prevent the temporary muscle loss.
On a personal note I can tell that none of this happened to me. Yes, I’ve lost some weight, but I was carrying few extra pound that I was happy to get rid of. Instead of looking skinny I have far more muscle now than I did when I was eating a more standard diet. Putting on muscle has become much easier than it used to be. I get bigger gains from doing less work - you just can’t beat that.
My body builds itself almost automatically. And all I’m doing is to follow the diet guidelines in Clear for Life and the exercise routine I learned from Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program.
I never go to the gym anymore. My strength training routine takes only 5 to 10 minutes a day. I only do exercises that I enjoy - I just can’t stand boring and repetitive stuff. And I do it all in my home.
Keep your fat consumption under 20% of total calories, preferably under 10%
Eat a pound of greens a day
Drink enough water; even a slight dehydration can lead to reduced capacity for muscular work
Isn’t it funny how good things just stack up when you do the right things? The same advice that helps you to get clear also gives you a great body. It’s a total transformation from skinny and acne ridden to clear, athletic and sexy. And that really sucks when everyone else is getting fatter and lazier : )
- Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
A common folk-wisdom saying states that one man’s medicine is another’s poison. My view is that one man’s poison is everybody’s poison. Generally speaking, of course there are some exceptions to this.
I imagine this piece of ‘wisdom’ got started on how different people reacted differently to same foods or substances. Some got better while others were worse off.
So what’s the deal here. If one man’s poisons is everybody’s poison how can this happen? Shouldn’t everybody get the same reaction?
I can think of several reasons why different people react differently to same substances.
Preexisting conditions
Allergies and other preexisting conditions can cause negative reactions to even healthy foods and substances. Tomatoes are very nutritious and healthy but many people are allergic to them.
In this case the saying is true, but this is the exception that confirms the rule. Once the person deals with these conditions (if possible) they won’t experience the negative reactions anymore.
Fruit is a great example of this. Some people say they react badly to fruits, it gives them stomach cramps or leads to breakouts. Therefore they conclude fruits are bad for them. In case of acne the real problem usually is insulin resistance. Once that’s handled fruits won’t cause acne anymore. In case of stomach cramps simply eating fruits to empty stomach (instead of eating them as dessert) solves the problem.
Going from worse to bad
Most people eat such horrible diets that switching to foods that are merely bad (in relation to ‘worse’ ‘bad’ is better) makes them feel better.
Healthy eating is more about what you don’t eat than what you eat. Adding a bit of healthy foods to a horrible diet won’t make much of a difference. But simply dropping the highly processed foods can make a big difference.
Let’s say you drink five cups of coffee a day. As a result you’ll get a migraine. You switch to defac coffee and your migraine goes away. Does that mean decaf coffee is good for you? No, it simply means caffeinated coffee is worse. And the cure has more to do with absence of caffeine than of any positive quality of decaf coffee.
Compare that to what happens to another person who has never touched coffee before. They drink decaf coffee, after which their head starts to spin and generally feel bad.
Does this mean decaf coffee is one man’s medicine and another’s poison? No it simply means that after drinking coffee for a while the other person can tolerate it. It’s bad for them also, but overtime their bodies have build defenses to minimize the negative effects. This is the reason why you need more alcohol to get drunk now than you needed when you started drinking.
Confusing symptoms with the real problem
In almost all health conditions symptoms are not the real problem. They simply reflect the underlying condition. In case of acne pimples are not the real problem. The real problem is chronic inflammation and blood sugar problems. These conditions lead to acne, and you cannot get rid of them by treating acne.
In many cases, and especially so with acne, the symptoms often get worse before they get better. They are part of the healing process. Say a person starts with the clear skin lifestyle and after few weeks their acne gets worse. A misguided person might conclude that they are on the wrong path.
Going back to their old lifestyle stops the healing process and their skin gets better. They conclude that Clear for Life was the worst thing they ever tried - it made their acne worse.
In this case one man’s medicine appeared like another’s poison. A well informed person persists through the temporary healing crisis and discovers that one man’s medicine is their medicine also.
These were just few examples off the top of my head to explain why different people can react differently to the same substance. I’m sure you can think of many others.
I hope this post helped you to file this piece of ‘wisdom’ to where it belongs: Alice’s Great Book of Dietary Fairytales. Brought to you by the Wonderland Press.
— Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
Some people say it’s the devil’s incarnation and nature’s candy, which others say it’s the healthiest food you can eat. In this post I explain, in detail, why most fears about fruit and unfounded and why eating fruits fixes the underlying cause of acne and many other health problems.
This is an answer to Krystal’s question at Clear Skin Space forums. She asked:
Okay, seriously, what is the deal? Everywhere I look someone is saying eat fruit, don’t eat fruit, limit your fruit, fruit should be unlimited?
So my question is this..
Does fruit cause people to break-out?
Welcome to the wonderful world of diet and nutrition. Want to get even more confused? Surf to Amazon.com and search books with ‘diet’ in title. You’ll get about 300′000 results - all with different conclusions and recommendations.
But generally the most intense battles in these diet wars are fought on the high-fat vs. high-carb front.
This is important for acne victims because blood sugar problems cause hormonal reaction that can lead to more acne. Some doctors even call acne ’skin diabetes’.
As a disclaimer I live on a high-carb, high-fiber, high-fiber diet and eat very little fat. I don’t have anything against low-carb diets. I just don’t see them as very smart thing to do. But if you are currently on one and it’s working for you then keep up with it. In the end of this post I’ll add some good points about them.
PROBLEMS WITH LOW-CARB THEORY
If you listen to the high-fat, also called low-carb, guys and gals you should shun away from fruits and carbs. Their theory goes that since carbs raise blood sugar levels, which raises insulin levels, which are linked to many diseases (acne included) one should avoid carbs.
The problem is that it’s all baloney. That theory has been proven wrong so many times, both in lab and in real life. Before writing this I again researched the issue a bit. I really loved this comment on a review study:
The purveyors of these diets [low-carb] portray them to be scientifically sound. Although there is some scientific rationale, two common devices used to support contentions include the overinterpretation of data and weaving together of unconnected scientific observations, and these processes often border on sophistry. Nevertheless, driven by the increased prevalence of overweight and obesity, these diets are increasingly popular despite a relative lack of rigorous scientific data. These diets present an attractive alternative to challenging lifestyle modifications (i.e. intentional calorie reduction and increased physical activity).
Here’s another aspect of low-carb theory that’s wrong.
The entire theoretical framework of low carb diets, like Atkins and The Zone, hang upon the notion that insulin is the root of all evil and so to limit insulin release one needs to limit carbohydrate intake. Dr. Atkins, for example, has a chapter entitled “Insulin–The Hormone That Makes You Fat,”[71] Protein Power calls it the “monster hormone,”[487] and the author of the Zone Diet calls insulin “the single most significant determinant of your weight.”[72]
What they overlook is that “protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion” as well.[73] Research in which study subjects served as their own controls, for example, has shown that under fasting conditions a quarter pound of beef raises insulin levels in diabetics as much as a quarter pound of straight sugar.[74]
Atkins’ featured foods like cheese and beef elevated insulin levels higher than “dreaded” high-carbohydrate foods like pasta. A single burger’s worth of beef, or three slices of cheddar, boosts insulin levels more than almost 2 cups of cooked pasta.[75] In fact a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that meat, compared to the amount of blood sugar it releases, seems to cause the most insulin secretion of any food tested.[76]
Low carb advocates like Atkins seem to completely ignore these facts. Recent medical reviews have called Atkins’ feel-good theories “factually flawed”[77] and “at best half-truths.”[78] “In the scientific world, books like the Zone Diet are generally regarded as fiction,” one reviewer wrote in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. “The scientific literature is in opposition…”[79] In a medical journal article entitled “Food Fads and Fallacies,” the Atkins Diet is referred to as a “‘New wives’ tale” with a “sprinkling of fallacies.”[80]
According to a 2003 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Dr. Atkins and his colleagues selectively recite the literature” to support their claims.[81] When researchers take the time to actually measure insulin levels, for instance, instead of just talking about them like Atkins does, they often find the opposite of what Atkins asserted.
Another problem with the theory behind low-carb diet is that it over simplifies things. In the Blood sugar worries blog post I explained the concept of input and output.
THE REAL REASON BEHIND BLOOD SUGAR PROBLEMS
The main reason you get blood sugar problems is because the output side is not working well. Glucose cannot exit from the bloodstream. A condition called insulin resistance, which means that the insulin receptors in cells don’t work well, or they are down regulated. When insulin receptors don’t work glucose cannot get out of the bloodstream. Here’s how Dr. Mark Jenkins put it:
It is not hyperinsulinemia that is the problem, it is the receptor. It has been repeatedly shown in the medical literature that increasing the sensitivity of peripheral insulin receptors reduces hyperinsulinemia and hypertension. This process is termed insulin sensitization and is accomplished by aerobic exercise, low-fat / high-carbohydrate diet, and reduction of excessive body fat. Conversely, obesity and high fat diets have been shown to induce insulin resistance. It is important that the high carbohydrate diet have predominantly complex carbohydrates and also have a high fiber content.
And if you think I’m just blowing smoke out my a** just Google ‘high-fat diet insulin resistance’. Scientists have known this thing since thirties.
When researchers want to study diabetes they feed mice a high-fat diet to create diabetes. There’s even a term called ‘high-fat diet induces insulin resistance‘.
If you can tolerate more science talk, here’s what happens to mice on a high-fat diet. If not, you can safely skip this quote.
Main Findings
Unsurprisingly, the mice fed the high-fat diet had an increased body weight compared to those maintained on a normal diet. The investigators observed stable hyperglycaemia and progressively increased hyperinsulinaemia in the mice on the high-fat diet. This is indicative of progressively worsening insulin resistance. After only one week on the high-fat diet, blood glucose levels were raised and intravenous glucose tolerance tests showed reduced glucose elimination and impaired insulin secretion. This demonstrates two distinct mechanistic characteristics of impaired glucose tolerance and type 2 diabetes; namely insulin resistance and islet dysfunction. Metabolic efficiency (that is the energy intake per gram body weight gain) was raised in both the mice fed a high-fat diet and those on a normal diet. However, the increase was attenuated in the mice fed the high-fat diet. Thus the weight gain observed in the high-fat group cannot be fully explained by increased energy intake; there was also a concomitant reduction in metabolic rate.
The concentration of glucose in the blood was consistently 1mmol/l higher in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet than in those on the normal diet throughout the 1 year study period. However, insulin levels continued to rise in the mice maintained on the high-fat diet. This suggests that insulin resistance progressively increased but there were compensatory mechanisms which kept the hyperglycaemia stable at 1mmol/l. When challenged with an intravenous glucose tolerance test, there was no compensation for the insulin resistance and there was a marked deterioration of glucose elimination. This, along with similar patterns observed following an oral glucose tolerance test, highlights that insulin secretion is defective in this model. When the DPP-IV inhibitor was administered in the drinking water of both groups of mice, there was an augmentation in insulin secretion resulting in improved glucose tolerance.
Conclusions and Future Directions
This work has demonstrated that the high-fat, diet-fed C57BL/6J mouse is a robust model for studying impaired glucose tolerance and early stage type 2 diabetes, as it exhibits similar metabolic defects as are observed in the human disease.
Now that we have paddled through a mountain of science talk we can move on to the question.
Yes, fruit can cause acne if you have insulin resistance. In that case the sugar in fruits causes a hormonal reaction that can lead to acne.
Get fat out of your blood and reduce insulin resistance with other lifestyle factors and fruit shouldn’t be a problem.
Most fruits are low to medium in glycemic index. And your body is perfectly equipped to deal with sugar from fruits. In Candida and acne blog posts I quoted Steve Pavlina who did an experiment with a raw food diet. Steve monitored his blood sugar levels and they remained remarkably stable. He said that he couldn’t spike his blood sugar levels even if he tried - even eating 19 bananas a day has no effect on blood sugar levels.
Your body is designed to run on sugar and it’s perfectly equipped to deal with it. All your cell run on sugar. The only time your body starts running on fat is if you severely restrict carbohydrate intake. This mechanism is a survival tool, allowing you to survive times of famine or when carbs might not be available. Practically the entire medical community agrees that this ketonic state is not healthy.
Even for people who say they breakout from fruits this is often not the whole truth. When they remove fat out of their diet fruits usually cause no problems. Here’s what on happy Clear for Life customer wrote to me.
Just got to say, you da man! I’m into my 4th week post paleo and my skin is doing very well. I haven’t kept to your diet and detox plan stringently, but am eating an abundance of organic fruits, greens, grains, tubers, and legumes while being very careful about my fat intake. Also maintaining a regular exercise and meditation routine while getting as much sunlight as I can manage working an office job during the rainy season in Seattle.
The first week on my diet I was quite amazed to eat levels of carbs that would have caused a carpet bombing of my face while on paleo. No such result.
After so many years of suffering from acne and then months of being chained to paleo, I’m still quite incredulous to the fact that I can have clear skin and live a normal life.
So you have my sincerest thanks for leading me to a diet and lifestyle that’s providing a long sought-after freedom.
Paleo, or Paleolithic diet, is often high in meat, healthy fats and vegetables with some fruits thrown in. Overall it’s a pretty healthy diet, but the high-fat content can lead to carb sensitivity.
NO ONE DIET FOR ALL PEOPLE
I don’t believe into blood type diet and metabolic type diet theories. These basically say that depending on genetic, or who knows what, make up some people are designed to run on carbs while some are designed to run on fat or protein. So far I haven’t found a single piece of credible evidence to support these theories. And they run against common sense, rationality and real life experience.
That said, I also don’t believe that one diet fits everybody. Yes, I believe that fruits and vegetables are the ideal food for humans. But because we have abused our bodies for decades some people have develped allergies, sensitivities and other conditions that can make eating fruits bad for them, at least some fruits. So we always have to look at the individual and not stick to a dogma.
GOOD POINTS WITH LOW-CARB DIETS
Now that you know why I choose not to eat a low-carb diet and wouldn’t recommend it let’s look at some of the good points in them.
People on low-carb diets tend to eat less processed and junk food they used to. Most junk food is carb-based. Just eliminating soft drinks, candies, pastries (trans fats anyone?) and fast foods can create miracles. I think that simply eating a diet of natural, whole foods is 80% of the solution.
Today people just eat too much of everything. We eat far too many calories. Low-carb diets often get people to eat less. That’s another huge step in reducing insulin resistance and creating health.
Low-carb diets often recommend eating more vegetables. Any diet that gets you to eat less junk and more vegetables is a step to the right direction. Points for low-carb on that.
Creates health awareness. Often when people go on a diet they also become more health conscious. So they might start exercising more and pay attention to their sleep. Diet is just one part of the solution, and in Clear for Life I explained the six elements of health you need to pay attention to. You could eat the perfect diet, but if you ignore the other elements you probably won’t make much progress in terms of health or curing acne.
Finally low-carb diets may get you clear. I know of several people who have gotten clear with a low-carb diet. Since acne is linked to blood sugar response removing carbs somehow short-circuits this mechanisms.
Still, I think high-fruit, low-fat diets are far better at allowing your body to heal itself and removing the root cause of acne. You can actually get to a point where you can eat several days in a row at McDonals and not have it affect your skin at all (unfortunately I speak from experience). Whereas on low-carbs diets such cheats lead to breakouts far more frequently.
CONCLUSION
I hope that by taking you through this long and perhaps a bit science filled journey I managed to shake off some fears you may have concerning fruits. The majority of the scientific community support the idea of high-carb, high-fiber diet in creating health. And fruit gives you both. Plus it’s filled with vitamins, antioxidants and other nutrients.
For all these reason I believe fruits is the ideal food for creating health and curing acne.
Recommended reading:
Fruit Controversy - A free, 30-page report from Frederic Patenaude dispelling the myths about fruits. You have to give your email-address, but Fred sends out good material and doesn’t spam you. And if you really don’t want his emails you can just not confirm your subscription, that way you won’t get any emails from him but still get access to the report.
Atkins exposed.org - A thorough review of science for and against Atkins and other low-carb diets.
Clear for Life - Well, of course you need to read my book : )
— Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
In my earlier posts about Candida I’ve often referred to Dr. Graham and what I’ve learned from him. Now you have an opportunity to hear it from the man himself. Naturalnews published an excerpt of Kevin Gianni’s interview with Dr. Graham.
Dr. Graham explains the blood sugar issue and how fat affects it perfectly. I really recommend you read this. This is reprinted with permission from naturalnews.com, and the title of the interview links to the original article at naturalnews.com.
(NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Dr. Doug Graham shares on fats, sugars and the body.
Renegade Roundtable with Dr. Doug Graham is a lifetime athlete and 27-year raw fooder. He’s been an advisor to top performers including tennis legend Martina Navratilova. He’s also the author of the lifestyle book 80/10/10.
Kevin That was a great answer to that question. I want to move into fat, because there’s a lot of talk in the raw food community where there’s more than one camp. One will say high fruit, low fat, low protein. Another one will say no fruit, greens and high fat. What are some of the challenges with eating a high fat diet?
Dr. Graham: Well from a medical standpoint we know that high fat diets have been linked to cancer and heart disease, diabetes and chronic fatigue. Even candida and most digestive disorders are all linked to the over consumption of fat. I agree, too much fruit is bad for you. People ask me all the time, “Isn’t too much fruit bad for you?” Yes, of course it is. Too much of anything is bad for you. That’s what the phrase means, is that you have a problem. As does the phrase, “Too little.” Part of the problem with too much fat is that you invariably also get two few carbohydrates, so you end up with a double whammy. As soon as you end up in that ‘too’ category, meaning too much or too little, you’ve got both sides of that seesaw swinging out of control. When you don’t eat enough carbohydrates you invariably end up with cravings. This is why over 70% of all of the eating disorders in the United States are associated with binging on complex carbohydrate foods. Because when you try to reduce your carbohydrate intake below that from which we are designed as a species, which is 80 plus, you invariably start to crave that for which we are designed. It would be like holding your breath. If you try to hold your breath you’re going to invariably really start wanting to breathe, a lot, soon.
So in the Standard American Diet where we’re eating about 40% of our calories from carbohydrates, we still see a tremendous number of people with disordered eating. But when we go to the standard raw approach, when the carbohydrate intake is halved again down to 20%, then we see massive challenges with binging, people going to refined sugars, relentlessly going to candy and alcohol and dried fruits and chocolates and anything that’s a refined sugar source, in order to make up for the lack of carbohydrates that they’re not eating through fruit.
Kevin You mentioned candida, let’s talk about that. There’s all sorts of approaches for this. One is to starve the candida with no sugar and the other is eliminate the fat.
Dr. Graham: Well, I think there’s a variety of approaches. We have to understand enough about candida to at least make some sense. Candida is a microorganism that has a very short lifespan. We’re talking hours, days is not even common. We’re talking hours. If you have a candida problem and you’re trying to get rid of it and you’re trying for more than a couple of days, you’re not trying an approach that’s working because it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days. You’re still feeding the candida.
What you have to look at is what does it do, what does it feed? It feeds on sugar, no question. It feeds on sugar and fats. All the cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. All the healthy cells, all the sick cells, all the cancer cells, all the damaged cells, all cells of the human body are fueled by sugar. Which means that there has to be a fuel delivery system to all the cells and that fuel delivery system is the blood stream. This is why doctors can measure what is known as your ‘blood sugar.’ All humans carry blood sugar. If your blood sugar level was zero, you would be dead. Therefore it is actually impossible to starve the candida of sugar by not eating sugar. If you’re on a diet of strictly olive oil, if you’re on a diet of strictly protein powder, or if you’re on a diet of strictly powdered sugar, if your pancreas is healthy and the rest of your system is healthy, the doctors should be able to measure your blood sugar and find out that it is within normal limits, in the normal ranges. It’s going to be the same whether you’re on a fast, not eating anything, or whether you’re on the Standard American Diet. It’s going to run, in American numbers, somewhere around 90-100. What we see is that everyone always carries blood sugar, that’s always there.
At that point we have to look at why does blood sugar rise and how does that affect what’s going on in terms of the candida issue? Essentially it’s like this, we have to bring sugar to the cells of the body. We do so through the delivery system of the blood stream. When we want to get more sugar to the blood through the blood stream, out of the blood stream, to the cells, this is done through a carrier system, essentially a doorman, that we call insulin, produced by the pancreas.
When the pancreas gets tired or when the pancreas isn’t working fast enough, it will receive assistance by a backup system called the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands, for instance, you’re walking up a hill and walking up the hill from the other direction is a bear. You both get to the top of the hill at the same time and whoa! You get a surge of adrenaline because you need fuel like crazy. You don’t actually have to outrun the bear but you have to at least outrun the other people that you’re with. So off you go, a surge of adrenaline. The adrenaline causes the pancreas to squirt out even more insulin and bam, you get an extra dose. What the insulin does is it attaches itself to the sugar in your bloodstream, helps it cross the membrane out of the bloodstream, helps to cross the membrane into the cell and it becomes essentially a doorman that opens the way for sugar to get out of the bloodstream.
When there is excess fat in the bloodstream, we bump into a problem because fat functions as an insulator. That’s what it does. It insulates us from jarring, it insulates us from electricity, it insulates us from hot and cold, it insulates us from bumps and bruises, it insulates in a wide variety of ways. Fat’s primary role is as an insulator. Does it have other purposes? Sure. But it’s primary role is as an insulator. It’s actually what creates the waterproof barrier of each cell that allows the contents of the cell to stay in the cell and the contents of whatever is outside, the extra-cellular fluid, to stay outside the cell. Fat is the essential barrier, an insulator.
If you pour a thimble full of fat, a thimble full of olive oil, onto a swimming pool, it will coat the entire surface of the swimming pool, creating a barrier. It’s a Please really good insulator. If you had a huge tube full of marbles and you poured in a little bit of oil and shook it up just a bit, that oil would coat every single marble, completely. It does the same thing to the cells inside the bloodstream. The fat starts functioning as a barrier as it coats itself around the insulin and coats itself around the sugar molecules, it makes it less effective for the insulin to find the sugar, for them to hook up. Now you’ve got a situation where there’s sugar in the bloodstream but it’s not getting out of the bloodstream. So the body produces a little bit more insulin. But the fat is blocking it. This is what’s referred to as insulin resistance. It’s actually not that the body is insulin resistant it’s that there’s too much fat in the bloodstream. Take away the fat and the insulin resistance goes away instantaneously, 100% of the time.
If the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin then we have a type I diabetes situation. Occasionally what will happen is that the adrenal glands will come in and they’ll kick in and try to help out the pancreas. That works fine except we can’t do that all the time or the adrenals become fatigued, what we refer to as chronic fatigue. Eventually what you end up with pancreas in the hole, adrenals in the hole, everybody falling down on the job and you’re still ending up with blood sugar levels that are too high.
Fortunately, our bodies are redundant in their design and there is a backup system for the backup system. There is a microbe that lives in the blood stream that literally consumes the excess sugar. The beauty of it is that in a one-all situation the microbe consumes the excess sugar and then as all species do when there’s an excess of food, it then blooms. The bloom creates a massive increase in population but there’s no more food supply so they just as quickly a die off. This is referred to in science as the balance of nature.
In this case what we see is that they’ll be a surge candida that eats the excess sugar quickly. It multiplies, it blooms, but now there’s no more excess sugar. The situation is resolved. There is candida in all human blood.
It’s a matter of how much candida. There’s no way to prevent sugar from being in human blood, so you can’t literally starve out the candida in that way. What you can prevent however is blood sugar becoming excessively high.
Since 1959 when the first studies came to light on this issue of ‘what is it that allows sugar into the bloodstream but does not allow it out of the bloodstream,’ it has been taught in science, in medical school and in health class that the problem is one of fat functioning as an insulator, preventing sugar from exiting the bloodstream. By lowering the fat we invariably allow the sugar out of the bloodstream and resolve a potential candida issue.
The funny thing is that the different approaches that we’re seeing are actually all the same approach. The approach used by some people for candida is to go on a fast, on a water-only fast, consume absolutely nothing for week or two, and give the adrenals a chance to recover, give the pancreas a chance to recover. While the candida issue itself goes away within 48-72 hours anyway and then doesn’t return.
The second approach is to go on a diet of eating almost nothing but greens, in which case blood sugar levels remain the same, the amount of fat in the bloodstream goes down and at the end of the week or two of eating nothing but greens you no longer have a candida problem. Unfortunately, you also don’t have a healthy eating plan to follow through on.
The third approach is to eat all the fruit you want, eat all the vegetables you care for, but avoid the consumption of overtly fatty foods for a week or two, and allow your body to heal itself because you’re no longer causing the problem.
To read the rest of this transcript for free as well as access a full archive of information by health experts on abundance, optimum health, and longevity just like Dr. Doug Graham, please visit http://www.renegadehealth.com/inner-cir… for a free 30 day trial.
—End of article—
Though this is just an excerpt of the interview it does cover everything there was about Candida. I listened to the interview and after that they went to other topics.
— Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin
