Several months ago I posted about how Martha Rotter figured out that her acne was caused by cow dairy products. Now a longer version of her story (by me) is on Boing Boing. There is a ton of useful information in the comments. Some examples:
“Dairy is what caused my acne.” Someone replied: “Same here, specifically milk. I switched to soy milk in high school and my moderately-bad acne went away very suddenly. . . . If I eat a lot of cheese at once, like having pizza more than a couple days a week, my backne gets worse and I get acne inside my ears.”Someone else misunderstands genetics: “I do have tumor-forming disease (fortunately stable, and partially corrected with surgery) so I do have some sympathy when it comes to this sort of thing, but my condition is so well established as genetic I never even saw hope in trying to control it with diet.” Aaron Blaisdell had a well-established genetic condition (porphyria) that went away when he changed his diet.
Someone else found that dairy mattered:
I had terrible acne as a teenager and I drank almost a carton of milk every day. . . . When I moved out on my own, I no longer had milk delivered at the door and I fell out of the habit of drinking it altogether, switching to tea and water instead. My face cleared within weeks. . . . Whenever I indulged in cheese, the break-outs returned.
Someone else discovered multiple causes:
I have had strikingly similar experiences with a very particular form of acne, for years. Multiple doctors with no results until I got frustrated with it. I heard that the four most common causes of skin reactions can be wheat, milk, peanut butter and eggs – so I took all of them out *and* meat.
And watched my skin slowly return to normal.
After playing with my food by putting one thing in, seeing what happened, and then taking that out and trying something else, I found that wheat in particular is the trigger for me with dairy as a close second.
Someone else: “I took wheat from my diet, and my skin cleared up. If I allow wheat back in for one day, the next day I have acne.”
Not all solutions were dietary:
My wife and I found the only thing that worked reliably–even including a couple of different kinds of antibiotics–was “the regimen” as described on acne.org. Basically you use a low-strength (2.5%) benzoyl peroxide every day and moisturise like mad afterwards.
These are just examples. There are many more helpful comments.
