Highlights
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The acne diet
The number of research articles published on nutrition and acne has been greater in the last 10 years than in the previous 50. This systematic review summarizes the findings.
In general, what’s good for your heart is also good for your skin, except chocolate.
The flavonoids in dark chocolate improve the endothelial lining and lower blood pressure for heart health, but chocolate can worsen acne. To see if it was the sugar or the chocolate, one study supplemented the groups with chocolate or jelly beans. Despite similar amounts of sugar, the chocolate group had more acne lesions. Chocolate also remained an acne trigger when dark chocolate without added milk or sugar was studied.
Diet influences hormones that are known to make acne worse. Eating a high-glycemic diet triggers excess insulin , which causes weight gain and inflammation. The sugar load in fruit juices, soft drinks, processed foods, and products made with white flour have a similar effect.
Dairy products are rich in estrogens, androgens, IGF-1 and bovine growth hormone. Both whole and skim milk contain hormones that cause acne, and lastly, saturated fats from non-dairy sources also pose an inflammatory risk.
An Acne Diet Summary
Foods to avoid in descending effect
- Dairy products.
- Foods with a high glycemic index and load. These are mainly sugar without fiber and include sweets, breads and other baked goods made from white flour, rice, fruit juices, soft drinks and processed foods.
- Saturated fat from excess red meat and fried foods.
- Chocolate.
- Although not a food, mental stress is also a known acne trigger. This gets worse if we eat the above foods when we are under stress (stress eating).
Foods to eat to avoid acne
- Whole vegetables and fruits.
- Essential fatty acids found in cold-water fish and oily plants such as flax seeds, walnuts, and avocados.
- Less acne has been associated with eating the Mediterranean diet, which includes the above high-fiber foods, whole grains, and olive oil.
Background
Dietary habits may play an important role in the development, duration and severity of acne, as shown in previous critical review articles on this association.
Methods
The objective of this systematic review is to complement the data available in the scientific literature spanning the last 10 years by inserting the key words "acne" or "acne vulgaris" and "diet", "nutrition", "food", "chocolate", "dairy", "whey protein", "fatty acid" or "beverage" in the period "January 2009-April 2020" within the PubMed database.
Results
Fifty-three reviewed articles met eligibility criteria. They included 11 interventional clinical trials (seven randomized controlled trials and four open-label uncontrolled studies) and 42 observational studies (17 case-control studies and 22 cross-sectional studies and three descriptive studies).
Conclusions
This review reinforces the notion of an exponential trend of rapidly growing interest in this topic by the scientific community.
Acne- promoting factors include high GI/GL foods, dairy products, fatty foods and chocolate, while acne-protective factors include fatty acids, fruits and vegetables.
The role played by specific dietary components of different foods, such as milk (whole/entire, low-fat, low-fat/skim), dairy products (heavy cream, ice cream, yogurt, cheese, etc.) ), or chocolate (cocoa, dark/milk chocolate), remains an unresolved issue and a target for future research.
Discussion
Although dietary habits were not considered a proven cause of acne in past medical literature, the numerous studies that have been published more recently in the last two decades unequivocally highlighted a link between diet and acne. However, many problems still remain unresolved.
The “hot topics” include the role played, either in clinical worsening or improvement of acne, by specific dietary components among those contained in milk and dairy products, fatty foods, chocolate, fresh fruits and vegetables.
A thorough analysis of the role of food in the development of acne must take into account not only the quantity of individual dietary components, but also their quality , as well as the availability of fresh, natural ingredients as opposed to highly processed industrial foods.
In addition to age and sex, other potential biases, such as family history, lifestyle (including smoking habits, physical and work activities, mental stress), and environmental factors, should always be taken into account. design of randomized controlled studies aimed at effectively identifying the role of a single diet.
Finally, future research should always be designed to avoid study limitations such as small sample size, lack of appropriate controls, potential recall bias, inaccurate clinical description, and inadequately reported results. and not detailed.
The long-held belief that diet could affect acne still persists worldwide in the majority of acne patients. However, very often patients still identify fried/fatty foods and chocolate as the main culprits, while they are less aware of the triggering role of dairy or high-GI foods, as recent research indicates.
Furthermore, they rarely seek information from reliable sources. Due to widespread access to the Internet, most health-related information regarding diet and acne is often gathered by patients online from web pages, including recommendations from self-proclaimed experts and not supported by medical research. It is important to warn patients that many results from such online searches may not only be unfounded but also misleading. Therefore, there is a need to disseminate correct and easy-to-understand information through authoritative and evidence-based health educational information sources to drive rational and effective individual changes in dietary behavior of acne patients.
