master your acne

Master Your Acne

THE SELF-STUDY GUIDE FOR ACNE SUCCESS

byDevin(Mooers

!!!!!©!2011

Table of Contents

.................................................................How To Use This Document 5

................................................................................Official Disclaimer 6

............................................................................Unofficial Disclaimer 7

.............................................................................................................1 8

The Ending, First 8

.............................................................................................................2 9

Are You Listening to Your Acne? 9How Come My Dermatologist Didn’t Tell Me All This? 11The Shotgun Approach 12Overcome the Victim Mentality 13Find Your Own Truth 13Symptoms vs. Causes 14

...........................................................................................................3 16

What Is Acne, Anyways? 16IGF-1 22Blood Sugar and Insulin 24Glycemic Index and Acne 25The Dangers of Inflammation 29The Role of P. acnes Bacteria 30Foods That Cause Inflammation 30Foods That Cool Inflammation 32On Supplements 33

...........................................................................................................4 35

Genes and Acne 35

...........................................................................................................5 39

What Can Tradition Teach Us? 39

...........................................................................................................6 42

The Four Worst Foods For Acne 42Acne Demon #1: Dairy 42Acne Demon #2: Sugar 45Acne Demon #3: Vegetable Oil 46Acne Demon #4: Gluten 49Summary 51

...........................................................................................................7 52

How to Get Even Faster Results 52Grains 52Beans & Legumes 53For Vegetarians and Vegans 55

...........................................................................................................8 56

So What Can I Eat? 56The Master List of Clear Skin Foods 57How NOT To Use This List 63Organic vs. Conventional 63Hidden Ingredients 66Eat Like Royalty 67Tricks to Save Money 69Benefits of Butter 70Educate Yourself 71

...........................................................................................................9 72

Supplements 72Omega-3s (EPA) 73Vitamin D 76Zinc 78

........................................................................................................10 82

Digestion and Gut Health 82

Master Your Acne! ! by Devin Mooers

© Devin Mooers 2011. Reproduction or distribution without authorization is strictly prohibited.

.........................................................................................................11 85

The Last Few Keys to Clear Skin 85Sleep 85Stress 86Exercise 89Quit Using Skin & Hair Care Products 90Clean Up Your Home and Office 92Smoking 93

.........................................................................................................12 94

Final Words 94

.............................................................................................Appendix 96

Glycemic Index and Insulin Index 96



How To Use This Document

Pretty simple – read it through, follow the techniques and advice, and you’ll soon be well on your way to clear skin!

Some parts are fairly complex, because acne is a complex problem, and I want you to understand the real causes of acne, because you must understand it before you can master it. I’ve tried my best to make this information as easy to understand as possible, but it’s tough work. If you find terms or concepts that are confusing, you can email me at [email protected], but don’t sweat the small stuff.

A note on navigation: if you’re reading this as a PDF, you can click on the page numbers in the Table of Contents to go the corresponding page.

Additional tables and information are included in the appendix.

Superscript-number citations appear at the end of the document.

I wish you luck!

Kind Regards,

Devin MooersMaster Your [email protected]



mailto:[email protected]




Official Disclaimer

Content in this book is for reference purposes and is not intended to substitute for advice given by a physician, pharmacist, or other licensed health-care professional. You should not use this information as self-diagnosis or for treating a health problem or disease. Contact your health-care provider immediately if you suspect that you have a medical problem. Information and statements regarding dietary supplements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or health condition.



Unofficial Disclaimer

With this method, results vary from person to person, depending on how much effort you dedicate to the method, and how strongly you persevere. By working hard at making these diet and lifestyle changes, you can truly transform your skin – that’s a promise.

So work hard, apply yourself, and you will see clear skin in less time than you ever thought possible!



1

The Ending, First

When you write a book, you’re not supposed to give away the ending on the first page. But here we go. Here’s how to cure acne:

Rub your face with coconut oil twice a day, drink green tea three times a day, sprinkle cinnamon on everything you eat, eat nothing but apples for three days, take a twice-daily cocktail of chromium, zinc, selenium, vitamin B5, vitamin B6, vitamin A, vitamin E, fish oil, fermented cod liver oil, EGCG, garlic extract, coconut oil, red palm oil, high-vitamin butter oil, evening primrose oil, MSM, saw palmetto, L-glutamine, alpha-lipoic acid, probiotics, Co-Q10, and resveratrol, and finally, surgically remove all your pimples with a scalpel. Bang, no acne!

Okay, that's pretty morbid. But aside from the scalpel, this approach would virtually guarantee you clear skin in a matter of weeks.

This approach is the sum total of all the advice given by the “acne gurus” out there. Then why not do all of these things?

Because it’s ridiculous, unsustainable, a waste of money, and possibly dangerous. I have tried many of these things, and you may have too – but I’m here to tell you that there’s a better way.

And that’s what this book is for.



2

Are You Listening to Your Acne?

“When you resort to attacking the messenger and not the message, you have lost the debate.”

ADDISON WHITHECOMB

Here's the thing: acne may well be the most important thing that ever happened to you.

Acne is not your enemy; it’s a messenger, carrying critical news about your health. You've got to listen, or risk serious disease down the road.

If you hadn't had acne, you wouldn't be here now, reading this. You have acne because your body's trying to say, "Listen to me, will you? You’re hurting me! You're doing something wrong, and I'm suffering, and acne is the best way I know how to tell you that!" If you cover up those signals with makeup or harsh medicines, you're stifling your body's cries for change.

Think about that for a moment. What are you doing every day to cover up these signals, to cover up your acne?

I say that having acne may be the best thing that ever happened to you, because you're learning something that people with perfect skin may never learn: how to listen to your body and give it what it needs for ultimate health.



So really, this acne stuff goes deeper than just a bunch of humiliating red bumps on your face – it's about taking your health into your own hands, overturning all the false information that's been drilled into your head, and taking control of your life. And finally achieving clear skin in the process.

I want you to flip acne around and start thinking of it as a positive force of change in your life.

The biggest leap you have to make between you and clear skin is to accept acne as a positive thing. As a friend, watching out for you.

When I was a child, I was deeply affected by the novel Ender’s Game, in which a boy prodigy commands humanity’s forces in an attack against a hostile alien race. One thing the boy says burned itself into my mind forever: love your enemies.

You have to give up the war on acne immediately. You can't win. You've been fighting that battle for a long time, and you're about ready to break down and surrender – that’s why you’re here, reading this. It turns out that surrendering is exactly what you must do. You must work with your acne. You must learn to see it as a partner, mentor, and tutor. You must respect it and feel compassion for it, and listen to what it has to say. Only then will its purpose be fulfilled, and it will disappear into the shadows, coming back only now again to give you a gentle tap on the shoulder and say, “Hey, you're going astray. Remember what we learned together? Remember that TLC you promised me?”

Another way to think about this: instead of fighting acne, instead of fighting the messenger, wage war on your real enemy, the enemy your acne’s trying to warn you about. Wage war on the toxins, the pollutants, the chemicals, the stress – all the bad stuff you've been unknowingly poisoning your body with.



How Come My Dermatologist Didn’t Tell Me All This?

“Love your enemies, just in case your friends turn out to be bastards.”

- ESKIMO PROVERB

You thought you could trust your doctor. After all, he went to medical school, right? He or she should know everything there is to know about skin health, including how diet affects acne, right?

Unfortunately, most medical schools fall short of the recommended minimum of 25 hours of required nutrition classes. Here are a few other shocking findings from a 2009 study by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill:1

1. Most graduating medical students continue to rate their nutrition preparation as inadequate

2. Only a quarter of medical schools require a dedicated nutrition course at all – for most, nutrition education is “integrated” into other courses

3. Medical students received an average of 19.6 hours of nutrition instruction

(Compare that to naturopathic doctor Alan C. Logan, whose transcript showed 223 hours of dedicated nutrition education in his four years of naturopathy school, not including hundreds of hours of clinical practice.2 Naturopathy is founded on nutrition; western medicine is clearly not.)

So your average doctor has barely studied nutrition at all, besides the minority of holistic or naturopathic doctors (and you probably would not be reading this if you had one of those). Consequently, your doctor probably believes that diet has little or nothing to do with acne – which you will soon



see is absolutely false. Quite simply, diet has almost everything to do with acne. And so your doctor may be misleading you, because they don’t know the whole story.

(More generally, it’s important to remember that dermatologists, along with all conventional doctors, base their knowledge on courses taken in medical school; these courses themselves are based on “popular wisdom” stances on health and diet, drawn largely from biased studies funded by giant pharmaceutical companies, grain-grower lobbies, the dairy lobby, and other huge corporate groups with a vested interest in making money. Most medical schools are heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies, as well. For these corporations, the actual health of people is a side-issue at best, and a complete non-issue at worst – far from the sine qua non that it should be. So remember: although medical professionals are kind and well-intentioned people, you’ve got to take doctors’ orders with a huge lump of salt. Remember what interests lay behind their years of medical schooling.)

Acne, on the other hand, is your friend; it will not lie to you, has your best interest in mind, and will not try to sell you prescriptions. It gently nudges you on the shoulder when you go astray.

The Shotgun Approach

To hell with silver bullets.

Why? Unless your aim is perfect, you'll miss every time, because acne is a complex moving target. No, we'll be using the shotgun approach. Why? Because it's the approach that will get rid of your acne the fastest. For most people, there is not just one single thing missing from their diet or lifestyle, but rather there’s a sticky, interconnected web of problems that must all be addressed to have the greatest chances of success.



Overcome the Victim Mentality

“If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.”

RICHARD BACH, AMERICAN AUTHOR

Alright, it's time to snap out of your victim mentality.

Do you ever catch yourself thinking this? “I'm a victim of acne. I got bad genes, and there's nothing I can do to fix it. The best I can do is use cover-up, or get prescription medicines to combat the acne.”

This victim mentality is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know that, deep-down. The more you tell yourself that you're a victim of acne, and that you're helpless to change it, the more you rob yourself of personal strength, willpower, and ability to change anything! The more you tell yourself you’re a victim, the more you make yourself one. You might even say that being a victim is boring – because nothing changes! You remain a victim forever, until you start stepping in and taking control.

You have to take responsibility for your acne. You brought it about, nobody else. Now, that might seem unfair, and you're right to think that your choices have been largely dictated by others – parents, friends, doctors, the media; but you've got to start taking responsibility now for turning those choices around. You've got to educate and empower yourself. This course is the key.

Find Your Own Truth

You might be asking yourself, “why should I believe what this guy has to say?” And you’re absolutely right to think that. Ultimately, I'm just another



guy with my own experience, my own knowledge, and my own opinions and beliefs. However, I urge you to read this if it resonates with you, if it speaks to you – to your logic, your emotions, and your bullshit meter. Accept what resonates, and discard (or at least carefully scrutinize) what doesn't – the things that strike you as odd or misguided or just plain wrong. This is not about me telling you what to do. It's me giving my stance on things, and you taking what you want from it. I've had enough of people telling me how to eat, how to exercise, how to live. And I bet you have too. Here's to independence of thought, and to free will.

With that, let’s dive into current acne treatments, and why they so often fail in the long term.

Symptoms vs. Causes

Here's the problem with almost every acne treatment in existence: in treats symptoms, not causes. You might be thinking, I don't care, as long as it gets rid of my acne! But listen: that's not a path you want to go down. You've been down that road, you know what it looks like. Trying cure after cure, rubbing baking soda on your face every night, paying hundreds of dollars for medications, in a blind stumbling search for something, just something that works, and doesn't leave you with too many nasty side effects. (Has anyone told you about the side effects of Accutane? Birth defects, hair loss, depression, sleep problems, seizures, nosebleeds, eczema, lower back pain, inflammatory bowel disease, breathing difficulties, and reduced blood flow to the brain? Is that something worth messing around with?)

To illustrate symptoms vs. causes, here’s an analogy: if you wanted to make the tomatoes growing in your back yard taste better, you could inject each one with a flavor-enhancing chemical cocktail, but you'd be treating the symptom (bad flavor) rather than the cause (poor environment). What you really need to do is fix the growing conditions. Put the tomatoes in the right



type of soil. Give them the sun, water, microbes and temperatures they need to grow and thrive.

Still going on the tomato analogy. Living things – tomatoes, plants, animals, and you – require healthy environments to grow and thrive. If conditions aren't right, you get problems. For example, planting tomatoes in muddy, soggy soil leads to tasteless, pale, mushy tomatoes. Similarly, planting humans in a poor environment leads to all sorts of diseases, of which acne is a very benign but extremely humiliating one.

The Internet is full to bursting with supposed miracle acne cures. A quick search turns up everything from prescription drugs to apple cider vinegar to baking soda to putting your own pee on your pimples. I'm willing to grant that there may be something of value in urine therapy, but it's still a surface-level, symptom-treating solution, and hence not really a solution at all – it just puts off the problem until later, when you decide to stop using whatever miracle cure you're on this week, or it decides to stop working. Then you hop onto the next miracle cure, the one that's actually going to work this time! You get the picture. It's cyclic.

To break out of this cycle, you and I need to examine our assumptions, and discover how we've been led astray. No more being addicted to acne drug companies and miracle cure-alls; it’s time to take the power into our own hands.

Alright, on to the meaty stuff.

When you get acne, it's a sign that there's something fundamentally wrong with your environment, including your diet, sleep habits, stress levels, exercise, and social and emotional well-being.



3

What Is Acne, Anyways?

Here we go. It’s science time, but I’ll keep it short and sweet. Skip it at your own risk. The better you understand acne, the faster you'll master it.

Let’s start with whiteheads versus blackheads.

From Wikipedia:

A blackhead (medically known as an open comedo,

plural comedones) is a yellow or blackish bump or plug on the skin. A blackhead is a type of acne

vulgaris. Contrary to the common belief that it is caused by poor hygiene, blackheads are caused

by excess oils that have accumulated in the sebaceous gland's duct. The substance found in

these bumps mostly consists of keratin and modified sebum (an oily secretion of the sebaceous gland),

which darkens as it oxidizes. Clogged hair follicles, where blackheads often occur, reflect light irregularly

to produce a blackhead's "black" hue. For this reason, the blockage might not necessarily look

black when extracted from the pore, but may have a more yellow-brown colour as a result of its melanin

content.

In contrast, a "whitehead" (more commonly known



as a pimple or a closed comedo) is a follicle that is

filled with the same material, sebum, but lacks a small opening to the skin surface. Since the air

cannot reach the follicle, the material is not oxidized, and remains white.

So already, we’re finding out that pimples are not caused by poor hygiene. Instead, acne occurs when your skin produces too much sebum (oil) and keratin (a protein that binds dead skin cells together so they clump up), forming microscopic plugs that block your hair follicles and lead to acne. Once that happens, sebum and dead skin cells can no longer exit the pore, so they start building up inside the pore:

That’s all fine and dandy, but what accounts for the redness and swelling? The fires of inflammation are to blame for that. Inflammation is really the knockout blow for acne sufferers; without it, all you’d have would be a bunch of tiny whiteheads



Normal hair follicle

and blackheads, but with no redness, no swelling, and no lumps. If only it were that easy!

(To clarify, sebum is an oily, waxy substance secreted by your sebaceous glands to protect, lubricate, and waterproof the skin. Sebum is made of fat (lipids), wax, and the debris of dead fat-producing cells. It also delivers Vitamin E, and contains 45% fatty acids with anti-microbial activity, fighting off bacteria and other pathogens.3)

(And keratinocytes are skin cells that form the entire structure of your outer skin layer. They’re really just dead skin cells that have been “keratinized,” or filled with semi-rigid waxy proteins, forming the tough, protective outer layer of your skin.)

Note: washing your face with acne scrubs irritates the skin, and can worsen inflammation. Furthermore, using benzoyl peroxide (Clearasil, others) can be effective in reducing acne, but it only covers up the problem, and thus prevents you from getting the critical warnings about your health that your acne is trying to give you.



Benzoyl peroxide is a drying and peeling agent, which works to extract those excess dead skin cells from your pores to unclog them. It also fights P. acnes bacteria and reduces inflammation. I used benzoyl peroxide for a long time, but I strongly advise against using it, based on what I know now. (It also bleached my favorite shirt on more than one occasion.)

Benzoyl peroxide causes over-drying of the skin, and slows down your skin’s self-healing process dramatically. People who use benzoyl peroxide frequently report red, dry, itchy, flaky skin – I had a friend in college using BP, and his whole face looked like it was about to flake off.

Benzoyl peroxide also causes problems you can’t see: for example, it destroys your body’s natural skin antioxidants, reducing skin levels of vitamin E by up to 95% and vitamin C by up to 70%.4 Vitamin E and C are two of your skin’s most potent natural defense mechanisms against pathogens and free radicals, and the fact that benzoyl peroxide almost completely knocks them out is extremely worrying.

To make matters worse, benzoyl peroxide causes the formation of free radicals, which severely damage your skin cells, mutate DNA, and slow the healing process. Free radicals may play a significant role in causing cancer. BP may be effective in unclogging your pores, but it causes so much collateral damage that people ought to think twice before using it, instead of pasting it on day after day (as I once did). The same goes for Accutane, Proactiv, Retin-A, which in most cases are far more dangerous than benzoyl peroxide – leave these products to acne sufferers who don’t care about their health. You’re not one of those people. Fortunately, there are other, better ways to cure acne that don’t have the same negative side effects, and that’s what this book is about.

Back to the causes of acne. So far, we’ve got three stages:



Let’s add a fourth stage: P. acnes bacteria colonize your blocked pores; once they set up shop, they reproduce by feeding on your sebum, and provoke extreme inflammation.

Here’s the kind of definition you find in a dermatology paper:5

It’s a little dry, but it’s accurate. Here’s what I call “The Action Movie Definition” (try saying it out loud with that epic “movie trailer” voice):

1. Your skin produces excess sebum.

2. Sebum mixes with excess keratin in your hair follicles, clogging them.

3. Inflammation pours on gasoline and lights a match.

The pathology consists of blockage and inflammation of the pilosebaceous unit, usually with the initial occurrence around the time of puberty in mid-adolescence. Androgens, which increase during puberty, stimulate the sebaceous gland to produce sebum and cause retention of keratinocytes around the sebaceous hair follicle orifice causing partial to complete blockage and leading to colonization with Propionibacterium acnes, which participates in the production of pro-inflammatory mediators.



And her fate, of course, is for you to decide.

So what’s to blame for acne? Why does our skin produce excess sebum? Why do dead skin cells get stuck in our hair follicles, when they should be able to escape naturally? Why do we have so much inflammation, to make the problem worse?

The actual science behind this would be news to your average dermatologist, especially because no one fully understands it yet, not even the front-line researchers. For now, I’m going to talk about one major player in acne that’s fairly well understood.

That player is called “insulin-like growth factor-1,” or IGF-1 for short.

One woman. One way. One desire: clear skin. But an evil mastermind has another plan: acne. This mastermind, calling himself “Hormione,” will do whatever it takes to stop our hero from reaching her goal. He will stop at nothing, torturing her skin cells into exuding more sebum, clogging her pores with glue-like keratin and even initiating bioterrorism with a virulent strain of P. acnes bacteria. The result? Utter mayhem. Our hero despairs. Her skin starts attacking itself, stoking the bonfires of inflammation, where before there was peace and harmony. Can she do what it takes to defeat this powerful opponent?



IGF-1

What is IGF-1? Well, IGF-1 is responsible for stimulating human growth, and is most active until the end of puberty; afterward, it's supposed to decline dramatically as you stop growing. But you can trick your body into producing extra IGF-1 in a few different ways – and most importantly, for our purposes, is diet. More on that in a minute – but first, how does IGF-1 give you acne?

IGF-1 makes acne worse because it directly signals your oil glands to produce more sebum. As we already know, too much sebum clogs pores, creating comedones and eventually acne. To make the problem worse, IGF-1 causes dead skin cells in your pores to stick together, so they can’t slough off and exit the pores like they’re supposed to – the second key ingredient in clogged pores and acne.

Here's how it works: skin cells die naturally all the time, as your skin renews and replaces itself. These dead skin cells are supposed to exit the skin through your pores, but essentially, IGF-1 prevents these dead cells from leaving, by clumping them together and binding them to the inside of your pores so they can't break off (the "follicular hyperkeratosis"). When these dead skin cells can't exit the pores properly, they build up and clog your pores, leading to those little (or big) red bumps we're so familiar with. Once your pores are clogged, all you need is a highly inflammatory diet and/or lifestyle, and you'll get great big acne lesions.

And IGF-1 itself worsens inflammation in a big way.

And here’s the kicker: certain foods make you produce way more IGF-1 than you’re supposed to. And a lot of those foods are mainstays in our food culture – you’ve probably eaten all of them in the past two days. I’ll get to these in a little bit.



By stimulating your body to produce extra IGF-1, you're creating a sickly milieu with the potential to create acne and other, more dangerous diseases (diabetes, clogged arteries & heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and that fearsome killer – cancer.) This is why acne goes more than skin-deep. It’s truly a whole-body problem.

So, fix your acne, fix your health. Put another way: fix the underlying causes of your acne, and you’ll be giving your body everything it needs to create optimum health, and shielding it from damaging foods and chemicals that could lead to disease and an early death.

What's one of the worst foods for stimulating IGF-1? Cow's milk. That's because cow's milk is meant for rapidly-growing calves, and is loaded with bovine IGF-1, which is structurally and functionally identical to human IGF-1. Drink milk, elevate your IGF-1, suffer from more acne.

What else should you watch out for that boosts IGF-1? Whey protein, creatine, and low-fat diets. Bodybuilders beware: it’s a widely-accepted fact that GOMAD (gallon of milk a day), protein powders, creatine, and testosterone boosters are likely to give you tons of acne along with those big muscles. If you use these products regularly, but you still want to get rid of acne, you have two options: 1) stop using them when you reach your desired mass goal, and then focus on curing your acne with the program outlined in this course; 2) continue to use them, but try your hardest to counteract them with powerful anti-inflammatory foods and anti-acne supplements, which I’ll get into later.

(Here's a tip: if you want to quickly and dramatically lower your IGF-1 levels, eat tomatoes. Tomato extract, tomato juice, tomato soup, cooked tomatoes, or fresh tomatoes. For whatever reason – some researchers think it might be the lycopene – tomatoes have a powerful positive effect on lowering IGF-1, and thus reducing acne. As I write this, I’m eating an omelette with fresh tomatoes, cooked tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, and a hefty dollop of tomato paste. Now that’s tomato power.)



Blood Sugar and Insulin

So we know that IGF-1 makes your body produce too much sebum; it turns out that blood sugar swings do exactly the same thing. The culprit? Insulin, that hormone so intimately involved in diabetes. Don't get me wrong, insulin is crucial to human health – it removes excess glucose (sugar) from the blood and packs it into your liver, muscles, and fat cells to be used as energy later. As a side effect, insulin keeps your blood sugar levels low, which would otherwise be toxic.6 And when insulin stops doing its job, you get diabetes, because your blood sugar stays high all the time. This can also cause acne.

Indeed, studies have shown that acne sufferers tend to have insulin systems that don't work very well. That means when they eat blood-sugar-spiking foods, their blood sugar stays elevated – especially sugar levels in the skin. (More on that in a moment.) So you might think of acne as “diabetes of the skin.” Of course, if you have diabetes of the skin, you can bet that there’s something wonky with your whole insulin-and-blood-sugar system, and you could be well on the road toward diabetes. Shocking fact: an estimated 79 million Americans have pre-diabetes but don't even know it.7

As one person put it, all you have to do to cure acne is to “eat, sleep, supplement and exercise like you are a diabetic.”8

In short: insulin provides very important functions in the body, but it has a dark side. Whenever you eat something that spikes your blood sugar, and thus your insulin levels – be it bread, sugar, white rice, potatoes, milk, or fruit juice – you're telling your skin to produce more sebum, which, as we now know, clogs pores and leads to acne. This leads us in to the final key to the acne puzzle: whenever you spike your blood sugar and release a cascade of insulin, you’re setting the stage for the most evil villain of all: inflammation.



Glycemic Index and Acne

A recent analysis of the literature found six studies supporting the fact that high-glycemic diets – meaning diets with lots of sugar, refined carbohydrates, and other foods that spike your blood sugar – contribute to acne.9 How? Primarily, by increasing IGF-1 and reducing sex hormone binding globulin (SBHG), thus increasing androgen activity, and causing excess sebum and keratin production.10 If you’ll remember, that’s a recipe for disaster, and leads to clogged pores. In addition to excessively boosting androgen activity, high-glycemic diets lead to insulin resistance, constantly elevated blood sugar, glycation, and a depressed immune system – all ingredients in a recipe for acne.

As you may already know, it’s actually possible to measure how strongly certain foods spike your blood sugar. The most well-known measurement is called the “glycemic index”. Foods are measured in how quickly and severely they spike your blood sugar, and given a corresponding numerical value.

Here’s trusty Wikipedia’s breakdown:11

Classification GI range Examples

Low GI 55 or less meat, eggs, most fruits and vegetables, legumes/pulses, whole grains, nuts, fructose and products low in carbohydrates

Medium GI 56–69 whole wheat products, basmati rice, sweet potato, sucrose, baked potatoes

High GI 70 and above white bread, most white rices, corn flakes, breakfast cereals, glucose, maltose

In terms of acne, the best place to be is the “Low GI” range. These foods will not cause nearly as much of a blood sugar and insulin rush as “Medium GI”



and “High GI” foods, and thus will not make your skin produce excess sebum or become inflamed.

The problem with “Glycemic Index” is that it doesn’t take into account how much of each food is actually carbohydrate. It only measures the blood-sugar-spiking effect of a gram of carrot carbohydrate versus a gram of white bread carbohydrate. It’s misleading, because carrots have a high glycemic index, but they also contain lots of water, fiber, and other nutrients, so when you eat a serving of carrots, you’re not actually getting much sugar at all – so it really doesn’t matter that it has a high glycemic index.

That’s why an alternative measurement was developed, called “Glycemic Load”. It adjusts for the individual carbohydrate content of each food, and standardizes the serving size.

Here’s the formula:

GL = GI x the amount of available carbohydrate in a 100-gram serving / 100

So if 100 grams of carrots contain 10 grams of carbohydrates, with a GI of 35,12 that’s a glycemic load of 35 * 10 / 100 = 3.5. That’s an extremely low glycemic load, and hence won’t worsen acne at all.

White bread contains 50g of carbohydrates per 100g, and has a GI of 71.13 That’s a glycemic load of 71 * 50 / 100 = 35.5. That’s 10 times as high as a serving of carrots! Stay away from white bread – your skin will thank you.

Now, glycemic load is indeed a useful measurement, but I’m sorry, I’ve just taken you through all that math just to tell you that there’s an even better one. It’s called the “Insulin Index.” It measures how much foods spike your insulin, not just your blood sugar. Your body releases insulin when your blood sugar rises after eating. This usually occurs after eating carbohydrates. However, the “Insulin Index” is so important because some foods that don’t contain any carbohydrates at all, including meat and eggs,



actually do provoke an insulin response, and as we’ve seen, controlling your body’s insulin response is extremely important in curing acne.

The real poster child for the Insulin Index is dairy – it creates an extremely high insulin response, even though it has a relatively low glycemic index and glycemic load. In fact, it spikes your insulin three to six times as much as it should, given its GI / GL.14 As we’ll soon see, dairy is one of the key foods to avoid in our diet-based approach to clear skin.

The best thing to do here is to learn and internalize the Insulin Index of common, everyday foods, and choose foods on the lower end of the spectrum. Here’s a combined list of the glycemic and insulin index of common foods:15

Food Food Type Glycemic Index

Insulin Index

All-Bran Breakfast Cereal 40 32Porridge Breakfast Cereal 60 40Muesli Breakfast Cereal 43 46Special K Breakfast Cereal 70 66Honeysmacks Breakfast Cereal 60 67Sustain Breakfast Cereal 66 71Cornflakes Breakfast Cereal 76 75Average: Breakfast Cereal 59 57White bread (baseline)

Carbohydrate-rich 100 100

White pasta Carbohydrate-rich 46 40Brown pasta Carbohydrate-rich 68 40Grain bread Carbohydrate-rich 60 56Brown rice Carbohydrate-rich 104 62French fries Carbohydrate-rich 71 74White rice Carbohydrate-rich 110 79



Whole-meal bread

Carbohydrate-rich 97 96

Potatoes Carbohydrate-rich 141 121Average: Carbohydrate-rich 88 74Eggs Protein-rich 42 31Cheese Protein-rich 55 45Beef Protein-rich 21 51Lentils Protein-rich 62 58Fish Protein-rich 28 59Baked beans Protein-rich 114 120Average: Protein-rich 54 61Apples Fruit 50 59Oranges Fruit 39 60Bananas Fruit 79 81Grapes Fruit 74 82Average: Fruit 61 71Peanuts Snack/confectionery 12 20Popcorn Snack/confectionery 62 54Potato chips Snack/confectionery 52 61Ice cream Snack/confectionery 70 89Yoghurt Snack/confectionery 62 115Mars Bars Snack/confectionery 79 122Jellybeans Snack/confectionery 118 160Average: Snack/confectionery 65 89Doughnuts Bakery product 63 74Croissants Bakery product 74 79Cake Bakery product 56 82Crackers Bakery product 118 87Cookies Bakery product 74 92Average: Bakery product 77 83



As you can see, carbohydrate-rich foods such as pastries, bread, cereals, and potatoes, along with beans and dairy products, have the highest insulin indices, and should be avoided. You will find a detailed list of which foods to eat, and which to avoid, in Chapter 7.

(Note: you won’t find fresh vegetables on this list, but it’s a moot point. All fresh vegetables – not including tubers such as potatoes – have an extremely low insulin index, and make excellent clear-skin foods.)

If you’d like to look up the glycemic load of other foods, visit the USDA’s nutrition database:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/

The above list is also included in the Appendix for easy reference.

The Dangers of Inflammation

What is inflammation? Simply put, it’s the body’s natural response to attackers – be they viruses, bacteria, chemicals, or (and this is key here) foods that your body doesn’t like. When inflammation works properly, it helps your body fight off an attack by bringing in white blood cells and all the warriors of your immune system. When it’s done fighting the infection, it stops. The swelling goes down, the redness disappears, the wound heals. But when it gets out of control, when it doesn’t stop, it causes your body all sorts of grievous problems – including acne. You have acne because you have systemic inflammation, an inflammation response that has torn loose, and keeps going, going, going, like a rogue computer virus. It will destroy you, if you do not stop in its tracks. Systemic inflammation is closely associated with cancer, heart disease, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s... I feel like a broken record. Are you starting to see





how absolutely critical it is to solve your acne if you want to live a long and healthy life?

The Role of P. acnes Bacteria

Contrary to popular belief, P. acnes bacteria do not actually cause acne. In fact, P. acnes isn’t even required to get really bad inflammatory acne.16,17 They simply make the problem worse. Once your pores get clogged with excess sebum and dead skin cells, an oxygen-deprived environment arises that’s a perfect home for P. acnes bacteria. (P. acnes bacteria are “anaerobic,” meaning “without oxygen” – they die if exposed to oxygen. There’s little oxygen inside clogged pores, so P. acnes can thrive there.) These bacteria feed on your sebum, and in the process create highly inflammatory waste products. When your immune system is compromised, as it is when you’re stressed out or when you eat the foods outlined in Chapter 4, you can’t effectively fight off these P. acnes bacteria, and they multiply rapidly inside your clogged hair follicles and cause severe inflammation, redness, and swelling.

Foods That Cause Inflammation

In a little bit, I’m going to share a bunch of ways to douse the fires of inflammation, but first, I want to talk about which foods contribute the most to this silent killer. You’d do well to stop eating these foods immediately if you want to halt inflammation and see an almost immediate improvement in your acne. (And, if you really follow this list well, permanent clear skin.)

Here’s a list of some of the worst ones:

Sugar



Vegetable oils (canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, cottonseed, corn oil)

Trans fats (commercial baked goods, margarine, fast foods, deep fried foods)

Dairy (especially pasteurized, homogenized, feedlot-produced milk)

Feedlot-raised meat (artificial hormones, antibiotics, omega-6 fats)

Processed meats (nitrites, nitrates, other preservatives)

Alcohol (more than one glass of wine per day)

Refined grains and white flour

Food additives

These foods are found everywhere in our modern food landscape. Go to your local grocery store, visit the middle 90% of the aisles, and start reading ingredients: you’ll notice that certain ingredients pop up over and over: vegetable oil, sugar, corn syrup, wheat flour, skim milk powder, sodium nitrite, potassium sorbate, yellow 5, blue 1, red 6... the list goes on and on. These things are not foods, they are food products. Would your great-grandmother have recognized these things as food? No. (Well, dairy, perhaps, but she would have eaten raw dairy, which is a whole different subject.)

Increasingly, these highly inflammatory “foods” are forming the bulk of the Westerner’s diet. Is it any surprise that diseases of inflammation are so rampant in our society?



Foods That Cool Inflammation

Alright, time for some antidotes. Here’s a list of the most potent foods you can eat to stop inflammation in its tracks:

✓ Fish (wild-caught only, not farm-raised) – for the exalted “omega-3 fats”

✓ Ginger

✓ Turmeric

✓ Pomegranates (and other dark red fruits and vegetables)

✓ Broccoli (and other dark green vegetables)

✓ Rosemary

✓ Basil

✓ Cherries

✓ Blueberries

✓ Kelp (kombu, wakame, arame, dulse)

✓ Shiitake mushrooms

✓ Papaya

✓ Extra-virgin olive oil

✓ Sweet potato

✓ Coconut oil

✓ Fermented foods (live sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi)

✓ White tea

✓ Free-range eggs



By focusing on these foods, and avoiding the worst inflammatory foods, you practically guarantee clear skin. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s how powerful of an effect food has on acne.

On Supplements

You can find a lot of supplements on the Internet to help reduce inflammation. However, from personal experience and all the research I have done, I strongly advise against using supplements, with a few key exceptions, because I think they’re a copout at best, and downright dangerous at worst, increasing the toxic load on your body. The main issue is that taking supplements distracts you from addressing the underlying problem, which is what you’re putting in your mouth. It just masks the problem, like using acne medications. It prevents you from benefiting from the wisdom of your body; it prevents you from seeing serious disease before it hits you.

I’ve seen it too often: people get obsessed with buying the perfect supplements, and don’t give a moment’s thought to the bulk of their diet. They think they can simply “make up” for all the bad stuff by popping pills: quercetin, resveratrol, fish oil, vitamin E, gamma-linoleic acid, enzymes, echinacea, green tea extract, and CoQ10. What’s the next magic supplement going to be?

Don’t take enzymes; eat the right foods so your body produces its own enzymes. Don’t take curcumin; cook with whole turmeric. Don’t take green tea extract; drink green tea. Whenever you take an extract of something, you’re denying yourself the synergistic power of that nutrient in its original context. Nutrition science has historically been one of the worst-practiced sciences out there. Just because some study finds that taking a resveratrol supplement reduces your chances of cancer doesn’t mean you should run



out and buy resveratrol; nutrients like this act in concert with other nutrients when they’re still together in whole foods. Such whole foods have hundreds, thousands of chemicals that interact in extremely complex ways we’re just beginning to understand. These complex interactions will take lifetimes to fully grasp. When you extract resveratrol from red wine, what else are you losing in the process?

Nutrition science is a flawed, fledgling science, so it would be wise to remain extremely skeptical of its conclusions. Use logic and reason to ask, “is there a better, simpler, more powerful way to accomplish this?” So don’t take resveratrol; drink red wine instead.

And remember, nutritional supplements companies exists primarily to make money, just like the dairy and grain industries. They are not interested in the most efficient way to heal people; they’re interested in your cash. The more stuff you buy from them, the better their bottom line. So they’re going to do everything they can to make you come back for more, to keep you buying the latest supplements. These companies jump on the opportunity to create new “breakthrough” supplements whenever a new study comes out, discovering some new chemical in pine needles that promises to add 20 years to your life. Save your money for real food, and support the people that grow it.

In sum: don’t try to take shortcuts. If you do, you’ll suffer for it later. Shortcuts are for people who don’t actually want to reach their goals. Shortcuts are like get-rich-quick schemes; they glitter on the outside but sting on the inside, leading you into pain and debt. If you take shortcuts with your health, you might improve your acne now, but you’ll start running into all sorts of health problems down the road. And you’re worth more than that.

Ultimately, the healthy way to live is the happy way to live.



4

Genes and Acne

“Devin, answer me this: I know someone who eats waffles for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and burgers for dinner, every single day, and they still have beautiful skin! That’s so unfair. I get acne no matter what I do. How does that work?”

I hear you. This can be extremely frustrating – I know, I had a friend exactly like this in college. You might struggle to eat really well, depriving yourself of all those comfort foods and junky wonder pastries, and you still have acne, while your friend munches away on a McChicken and fries and has nary a spot on that crystal-clear face.

You might be tempted to think it’s just genes – your friend got lucky, and you got the short end of the stick. There’s a bit of truth to that, but in reality, it’s way more complicated. And you have more power to change it than you think.

The secret? It’s called epigenetics.

Basically, you have about 20,000 genes, which are more or less set in stone. All doctors know this. However, what most doctors don’t yet acknowledge is that genes are only part of the story. The fact is, the way your genes are expressed changes dramatically with your diet and lifestyle. This strikes a huge blow to modern diet, nutrition, health, and science as we know it, but it’s still relatively unknown, because it’s such a cutting-edge science. Most health professionals went to medical school long before we knew anything about epigenetics.



What is epigenetics? Quite simply, it’s control above the genes. Here’s the definition according to Wikipedia:

“The study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence.”

English? Try this: your body can change the way your genes behave, and you can pass those changes on to your offspring, without altering your underlying DNA at all! Think about your genes as lightbulbs; epigenetics gives you a dimmer control for each of your genes, so you can turn them on, off, or dim them down for mood lighting.18

Why is this important for acne? Well, essentially, you can build up a reserve of “epigenetic wealth,” by living in the healthiest environment possible; in terms of the “lightbulb” metaphor, this means you’ve selectively turned on, off, and dimmed all the lights (genes) to give the perfect ambience. That’s “epigenetic wealth,” and it creates radiant health. When you have kids, you pass on this “wealth” to them, so they too bloom with health. Your kids can repeat the process, living in an outstanding environment, improving their gene expression even more, and adding to that epigenetic bank account. They’ll pass that on your grandkids. Essentially, with each successive generation, your epigenetic bank account rises or falls; the influence of your environment multiplies. This concept of “epigenetic wealth” is nothing other than rapidly accelerated adaptation, or in other words, evolution without any actual changes to DNA.

Back to your junk-food-eating friend: this person probably inherited a huge reserve of epigenetic wealth when she was born, meaning that for many generations, her ancestors had been living in healthy environments – clean air, traditional food, lots of sunshine, loving relationships, daily exercise, and low stress.

You, like me, might not be so lucky.



You and I may have inherited a depleted reserve of epigenetic wealth, and consequently our gene expression suffers. Our genetic “lighting” is all wrong. – some lights that should be on for clear skin are actually off, and vice versa. We tend to get acne more easily, as well as a range of other diseases. C’est la vie. We have to take more extreme measures.

After all this, you might be feeling a little defeated. After all, if your “bank account” is already overdrawn, what can you do but just continue to suffer from acne? Fortunately, you have a lot more power than you think to rapidly build back epigenetic wealth. You can build up that epigenetic bank account by replicating living conditions to which humans are best adapted: eating the optimum foods, living a happy and fun-filled life, getting lots of sun, exercising regularly, and pulling the plug on stress. All these things combine synergistically to create mountains of epigenetic wealth, which you can pour into that bank account and start enjoying outstanding health – which includes, of course, perfectly clear skin!

So, it might be a little tougher for you than for your friend to achieve that beautiful skin, but if you do tackle this challenge, you'll also be creating healthy habits for the rest of your life. Your friend won’t be quite so lucky. While you continue your youth into your old age, your burger-eating-friend has no impetus to change diet, and consequently vaporizes her inherited epigenetic wealth like a spoiled princess. The epigenetic bank account can easily be obliterated in one generation. Your friend is at risk of declining in health later in life, developing fat around the waist, diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease.

In other words, your friend is spending money, while you’re earning it. Who’s going to be wealthier in 20 years?

For me, tackling acne was the first test on my road to seeking ultimate health. I strive to add a little more to my epigenetic bank account every day. My acne is completely gone, and while I’m not yet where I want to be in terms of overall health, I'm giving it all I've got. Step by step, slow and



steady. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme – it’s a smart and comprehensive plan to gradually building up an impenetrable store of wealth.

If I hadn't had acne to begin with, I would probably still be eating puffed wheat cereal and pasteurized, homogenized, feedlot-produced milk for breakfast. Instead, I have found a diet and lifestyle that not only keep acne away, but also give me thicker hair, keep me from getting sick even when everyone around me has colds or the flu, and give me more energy, mental clarity, and better all-around mood and approach to life.



5

What Can Tradition Teach Us?

If you visit the Mbenga pygmies in the Congo basin, you won’t find a spot of acne. If you visit the Aché tribe of Paraguay, all you’ll find is flawless, clear skin. How about the Kitavan Pacific Islanders? After examining 1200 of them, acne expert Dr. Loren Cordain found not a single pimple.19

Visit your local high school, and you’ll find things a little different.

Why such a chasm of difference? Continuing on the theme of epigenetics, the key difference here is environment. The environment these native peoples live in – their diet and everyday lifestyle – differs absurdly from our cozy Western civilized environment. It’s truly night and day.

Let’s take a closer look at the differences:!

NATIVE TRIBES WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Relaxed, easygoing life Chronic stress

Anti-inflammatory diet Pro-inflammatory diet

Lots of exercise, hunting and gathering

Walking to the kitchen and back

Plenty of daily sun exposure Little to no daily sun exposure

Whole, wild foods Processed, industrial foods

Fish, wild vegetables, wild game, berries

Fish sticks, canned corn, burgers, candy



Pure foods Foods loaded with chemicals

High omega-3 fat consumption Miserably low omega-3 fat consumption

Surplus of vitamins and minerals Vitamin and mineral deficiencies

Clean, pure water Chlorinated water with heavy metals

Fresh air Noxious, polluted air

Trees Cubicles

Surrounded by nature Surrounded by concrete

Is it any wonder that these traditional societies are not only completely acne-free, but also free of most of the so-called “diseases of civilization”? The cancers, the heart disease, the diabetes? Looking at the above comparison, even someone with no knowledge of nutrition or health whatsoever could tell you which group was likely to live the longest, and be the healthiest.

My own experiences echo this disparity. I vividly remember a month I spent in Tanzania back in high school, on a volunteer trip to set up computer labs in secondary schools in the bush. I visited several times with Maasai tribes to learn about their way of life, which was eroding away with the sands of time as young people migrated to the city slums. They were extremely generous people; during one of the visits, the Maasai spitted and roasted a whole goat for us. It must have been a scrawny old geezer of a goat, because you were still left with a mouthful of gristle after five minutes of chewing. But the ceremony of it was moving. And not only were they extremely gracious, but they also had beautiful skin. Not a scar on them, not a pimple, not a cyst, nothing.



On a very different trip, this time to Edinburgh, Scotland, I stopped in at a Pizza Hut for a buffet lunch after a long stressful day of computer shopping in a foreign country and dealing with no end of bank problems. I was further saddened when I saw a teenager there, his face pockmarked into oblivion with acne scars. I'm guessing that he, like most people his age, really suffers for it. I bet it hurts his self-confidence, and consequently his relationships. Yet there he was, chomping into a big slice of Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza, after which he moved onto a plate of pasta with white cheese sauce. I saw myself in him, my younger self, and I cringed inside, wishing I could reach out to him and tell him what I now know.

This course is my attempt to reach out to you. To help you do what I’ve done. So you can enjoy the clear skin you were meant to have.



6

The Four Worst Foods For Acne

This is the bread and butter of this whole program. There are four criminal foods on the “Most Wanted” list for acne. If you start avoiding these foods today, you will mostly likely see a huge improvement in days. You will see pimples start to shrink and dry up, you will see redness and swelling go down, and you will be well on your way to clear skin.

To put it succinctly: removing these foods from your diet will be the single most powerful thing you can do to cure your acne. It’s the “80%” in the 80/20 equation. It’s Occam’s Razor. It’s the big stick. The grenade launcher. The big kahuna. Remove these foods first, and you will have done most of the work toward becoming clear once and for all.

Keep in mind that it may take up to 90 days, after completely removing these foods from your diet, for you to finally stop getting new zits; this is because comedones take up to 90 days to form into pimples from the day they first become clogged. That said, you will see an almost instant reduction in redness and swelling, which is practically as good as not having any acne at all (because you can hardly see it).

Here we go – in no particular order, the acne demons:

Acne Demon #1: Dairy

Dairy, especially dairy derived from feedlot, hormone-injected, antibiotic-loaded cows is probably the #1 acne-causing food. Dairy is absolutely loaded



with IGF-1, other growth hormones intended for rapidly-growing baby calves and which cause inflammation and acne in humans, artificial antibiotics and hormones, difficult-to-digest proteins that turn your immune system against itself and also fan the fires of inflammation, and the sugars lactose and galactose, which damage your skin cells and blood vessels and (you guessed it) worsen inflammation. Dairy causes acne on all fronts:

Dairy also spikes insulin, even though it shouldn’t, because it has an extremely low glycemic index. It has an extremely low glycemic index of 15-30, but it actually spikes your insulin as much as white bread.20 Insulin causes your liver to produce more IGF-1, so you get a double dose of this potent acne-causing growth hormone: the bovine IGF-1 already present in the milk PLUS the IGF-1 produced by your own liver as dairy spikes your insulin.21,22

Now, some people consider raw, unpasteurized dairy to be a health food. Some acne sufferers have no problem consuming raw dairy, be it raw milk, raw goat’s milk, raw cheese, raw butter, or raw kefir. Personally, I think you have to experiment with this to see how your body responds. Cut out all dairy first, then when your acne is under control, experiment with raw dairy if you wish. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to find raw milk, as it’s illegal to sell in most states.23

(Side note: raw dairy is also easier to digest than pasteurized dairy, for several reasons. First, raw dairy still contains lactase and other enzymes which make it easier to digest. Second, and perhaps more importantly, raw

1. Dairy makes your skin secrete excess sebum

2. Dairy clogs your pores by binding dead skin cells inside your hair follicles

3. Dairy promotes inflammation, leading to redness, swelling, and nodular and cystic acne



dairy farmers typically use Jersey or Guernsey cows, which produce predominantly “A2” milk, instead of the problematic “A1” type milk produced by Holstein cows on large diary farms. Many people who have been diagnosed as lactose intolerant are actually allergic to the milk protein BCM7 in A1 milk, and are not lactose intolerant at all, finding that they can drink A2 milk with no problem.24 You would need to test this for yourself – but only once you’ve gotten your acne under control.)

So the only readily available dairy has been pasteurized and homogenized. These processes subject the dairy to intense heat and pressure to make it last longer on the shelf and in your refrigerator and to prevent the cream from separating.25 These processes turn a possible health food into an utter poison. If you want clear skin, you must stop eating dairy. Milk is the worst dairy product for acne, so cut it out first, and avoid it with a vengeance. You’ll see me recommend eating butter later on, but that’s because butter is mostly fat and contains very little of the chemicals, hormones, and proteins that cause acne.

For acne, the fastest solution is to go for 90 days completely dairy-free (except for butter and ghee), both pasteurized and raw, including milk, kefir, cream, cheese, cottage cheese, cream cheese, crème fraiche, sour cream, yogurt, ice cream, milk chocolate, powdered milk, condensed milk, and anything containing dairy products. Once you get rid of your acne completely, then you might want to start experimenting with small bits of raw cheese, raw grass-fed heavy cream, or full-fat plain yogurt, if you’re really missing dairy. That said, go 100% dairy-free for 90 days and you will be truly amazed at the difference in your skin.

Note: you have to be especially vigilant when you cut out dairy, because it’s addictive in the same way that opium is addictive. Dairy contains opioid peptides, which activate opiate receptors in the brain via the same mechanism that illegal drugs use. Don’t give in – cravings should disappear after a week or two.



Acne Demon #2: Sugar

Sugar gives you acne. Plain and simple. Sugar causes your blood sugar to spike, releasing an insulin cascade – as we’ve seen already, this causes your skin to produce too much sebum and drives inflammation. Sugar also glycates your cells as it travels through your bloodstream, damaging, stiffening, and prematurely aging skin cells and blood vessels. Glycation is largely responsible for wrinkles, as well, so you can kill two birds with one stone by cutting out sugar. Acne and wrinkles, both.

Sugar can be extremely difficult to cut out if you eat it regularly. Why? It’s incredibly addictive. Shockingly, a 2007 study found that sugar is more addictive than crack cocaine.26 That should be serious cause for worry, because sugar is everywhere. Fruit juice, cereal, bread, Thai food, Chinese food, pastries, doughnuts, candy, chocolate, soy milk, almond milk, dairy products, sports drinks, energy bars – the list goes on ad infinitum. It’s everywhere, it’s addictive, and it’s incredibly dangerous for your health. Eating sugar makes your pancreas work overtime to produce enough insulin to deal with the sugar; do this enough times, and your pancreas can’t keep up. You don’t produce enough insulin, and what little you do produce doesn’t work very well because your cells become insulin-resistant. Eventually, your fasting blood glucose rises just a little bit higher than it normally should be, leading to constant, minor damage of all your body’s systems through glycation. In contrast, on a low-sugar, low-glycemic diet, your immune system has no trouble flushing out the toxic by-products of glycation – called AGEs, or advanced glycation end-products – but on a moderate or high-sugar diet, your immune system can’t keep up, and the sugar constantly attacks your body. This damage shows up most visibly in your skin, with acne.

Sugar also reduces your circulatory system’s effectiveness, making it more difficult to pump blood and nutrients to all areas of the body, including the skin. This is why people with diabetes go blind and develop numbness in the



limbs. For acne’s sake, you need a circulatory system that’s working at full capacity to transport all the required nutrients to your skin. That way, your skin can reduce inflammation, fight off infection by P. acnes bacteria, and work to stop lipid peroxidation and unclog your pores.

To sum up: if you eat sugar, your pores will become clogged and inflamed, and you’ll worsen your acne. If instead you choose to avoid sugar, your inflammation levels will fall, and your skin will start to heal itself naturally.

Acne Demon #3: Vegetable Oil

This is one cause of acne you might not have heard before. Vegetable and seed oils, including canola, rapeseed, sunflower, safflower, soybean, corn, and cottonseed oils, as well as shortening and margarine, contain alien fats that wreak severe havoc on your body, including your skin. You’ve heard about trans fats, right? Trans fats completely destroy your cholesterol levels and physically clog up your arteries. It goes without saying that you should completely avoid them. However, most vegetable oils contain trans fats, due to the extreme pressure, solvents, deodorizers, bleaches, and heat processing required to extract and refine the oils.

Shocking fact: “Chemical analysis shows that even bottles of organic, expeller-pressed canola oil contain as much as five percent trans fats, plus cyclic hydrocarbons (carcinogens) and oxyphytosterols (highly damaging to arteries).”27

Five percent trans fats? This is “heart-healthy” canola oil we’re talking about! These kinds of shocking findings start to make one wonder about the intentions of vegetable-oil companies and their “heart-healthy” advertising campaigns. Trans fat is one of the most heart-damaging food substances you can eat.



In fact, it would be more accurate to think of trans fats as “zombie fats”, because they literally reproduce inside of you. Heat-damaged trans fats zombify innocent fats in your body through free-radical chain reactions, turning them into new zombie fats, spreading the plague and damaging your DNA, your cell membranes, and all the good fats you’ve stored up for critical functions.28

In addition, vegetable and seed oils contain excessive amounts of omega-6 oils and virtually no omega-3, a combination that leads to severe inflammation. For thousands upon thousands of years, traditional hunter-gatherer societies – our ancestors – maintained an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 1:1. Today, our ratio is closer to 1:20. Such an overload of omega-6 fats signals your genes to produce severe, systemic inflammation.

Even worse, the anti-inflammatory omega-3 fats are especially vulnerable to zombification by trans fats, because their chemical configuration makes them extremely reactive. If you’re already not eating much omega-3, and what little you are eating gets scavenged and zombified by trans fats, you’re in serious inflammatory trouble. As this effect multiplies and compounds itself, things get particularly scary in your skin, when the fatty acids in your sebum start getting peroxidized and zombified too. Some acne researchers are beginning to speculate that lipid peroxidation, via trans fats and free radicals, sets the stage for all the other pathogenic factors in acne, including creating a breeding ground for P. acnes and unleashing a cyclic, self-multiplying cascade of inflammation.29

It turns out that vegetable oils also reduce the germ-fighting power of your own sebum, making your skin even more vulnerable to colonization by P. acnes.30 Normally, your sebum fights off invading pathogens with antioxidants, enzymes, and immune cells. But it needs a key type of nutrient to do so. When you eat vegetable oil instead of healthy saturated fats like coconut oil, butter, and lard, you’re depriving your skin of medium-chain fatty acids, which are extremely potent bacteria-fighters that we’ll dive into later when we talk about coconut oil. Medium-chain fatty acids are highest in



coconut oil, red palm oil, butter, lard, tallow, and meat fat. For now, just remember: if you want to support your skin in fighting off Propionibacterium acnes, toss out the vegetable oil, and use these healthy saturated fats instead.

In fact, prior to 1910, the majority of dietary fats consisted of highly saturated fats like butter, beef tallow, and lard. These fats have gotten smashed, ridiculed, and lambasted with an absurd amount of bad press over the last few decades, but the best new research is revealing all these fears might just be unfounded. A recent meta-analysis, analyzing data from over 300,000 study subjects, found that there is no correlation between saturated fat and heart disease.31,32 Instead, we’re now learning that butter, tallow, and lard are actually some of the healthiest fats out there.33 Add to these olive oil, coconut oil, red palm oil, and macadamia oil, and you’ll be eating healthy fats that will nourish your skin, as well as protect you from other, more sinister health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. It’s little wonder that rates of these diseases have risen steadily as we’ve eaten more and more trans-fat-loaded vegetable oils, displacing healthy, traditional saturated fats.

(Note: you may have heard that saturated fats cause inflammation. It’s true that when saturated fat accumulates in your body, it causes chronic inflammation; however, as researchers from the Netherlands have shown, saturated fat only accumulates in your body if you eat a high-glycemic diet.34 If you’re eating a low-glycemic diet, as I recommend in this book, then you’ve got nothing to fear from eating saturated fat – your body will not let it accumulate it, but instead will burn it for energy immediately.)

My advice: if you want clear skin, start treating vegetable oils like poison. The trouble is, vegetable oils are in almost everything. Breads, cookies, cakes, baked goods, pasta sauces, dipping sauces, margarine, shortening, spreads, hummus, cereals, granola, candy, energy bars, salad dressings, and anything else that comes in a package more often than not contains some form of vegetable oil. Beware. Read labels carefully. Better yet, buy all your



own fresh ingredients, and make your own sauces, salad dressings, and dips. They’ll taste better that way.

Also, stay away from commercially-raised chicken, beef, and pork; according to fats researcher Dr. Ray Peat, animals that eat polyunsaturated fat (corn, grains) don’t produce saturated fat like they normally would; instead, they produce more polyunsaturated fat.35 So when you eat commercially-raised meat, you’re essentially loading yourself with soy and corn oil. Just because it doesn’t say “vegetable oil” in the ingredients doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain any. Opt instead for free-range, organic chicken, grass-fed beef, and pastured pork (if you can find it). Stores like Whole Foods are the best places to find these, along with your local farmer’s market. With these naturally-raised meats, you’ll be getting healthy saturated fat and a good dose of omega-3s as well, instead of damaging, acne-causing vegetable oils.

In sum, vegetable oils are a huge problem for acne, and could help explain why acne is so widespread in Western society. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of acne sufferers finding huge success by cutting out vegetable oils completely. Some even find that they cure their acne completely, only by removing vegetable oils. Everyone’s different, though, and for me – and most likely for you – vegetable oils are only part of the acne problem.

So we’re going to stick to the shotgun approach, and fix everything at once – because that’s the fastest route to clear skin.

Acne Demon #4: Gluten

Almost every food product containing vegetable oil will also contain gluten, an extremely problematic protein for acne. Now, the first problem with gluten grains (wheat, rye, barley, spelt, kamut, oats) is that they spike your blood sugar, causing a rush of insulin and a surge of inflammation. However, this is true of all grains. The huge problem specific to gluten is the gluten



itself – by recent accounts, a majority of the world’s population is sensitive or allergic to gluten at some level. You may have noticed the recent rise of “Gluten-Free” foods in your grocery store – many stores have entire sections dedicated to products without gluten. And it’s for a good reason: the world is finally waking up to the dangers of this mischievous protein.

Essentially, when you eat gluten, your body tries to break it down into its building blocks, called amino acids, just as it does with all proteins; the catch is that most people lack the enzymes necessary to begin this process. Gluten is a huge protein. When your body can’t break it down, it passes right through into your small intestine, damaging the villi on the intestinal wall – the tiny fingerlike protrusions that absorb nutrients from your digested food – and thereby damaging your ability to absorb nutrients. Nutrient deficiencies can indeed lead to acne – zinc, chromium, selenium, vitamin B5, vitamin B6, vitamin A, vitamin C, and vitamin E are common ones.36 To make matters worse, gluten then passes through your intestinal lining and into your bloodstream, where it unleashes utter mayhem. Your body thinks gluten is a poisonous, alien invader, and creates antibodies to fight it off. The next time you eat gluten, it passes through your intestinal wall and triggers your immune defenses. When this happens over and over, you put your immune system on constant red alert, and it begins to attack healthy tissues.

This is known as an autoimmune disorder, where your body attacks itself because it constantly thinks it’s getting invaded by alien proteins, when in reality you’re just eating bread. In this way, gluten overtaxes your immune system, and creates chronic inflammation as long as you keep eating it. You’ve heard of full-blown celiac patients? They can get severe, life-threatening allergic responses if they eat gluten. For most people, the allergic response is much lower-key, but this makes it worse; gluten sensitivity becomes an insidious problem, because it’s never severe enough to take you to the doctor.



You can get a blood test for celiac disease and full-blown gluten allergies, but you run the risk of getting a false negative. You’re more likely to have sub-clinical gluten sensitivity than full-blown celiac disease, and these tests simply aren’t sensitive enough to diagnose that. So you might test negative and think that gluten is all fine and dandy, but could still have a strong enough gluten sensitivity that just a small amount would make you break out. Again, trust in the shotgun method here; it will get you clear skin the fastest. Wait until after you’ve cleared up completely to start experimenting. After all, what’s more important to you? Eating gluten, or avoiding acne?

Summary

Alright, we’ve finished learning about the four worst foods for acne. Congratulations! If you immediately cut these foods from your diet, you will most likely see major improvements in one week or less, and completely clear skin in just 90 days.



7

How to Get Even Faster Results

If you want even faster results, there are a few more things you can cut out of your diet. They are not quite as awful as the Top Four Worst Foods listed above, but they are sufficiently damaging to your skin that cutting them out as well can speed up the process of clearing your skin. Here they are:

Grains

Grains rob your body of minerals and vitamins, thus contributing to acne. Whole grains are even worse. I know, demonizing whole grains is tantamount to nutritional heresy, but it must be done. Here's why they're such a problem: Whole grains are the seeds of plants. The mission of any seed is to survive long enough to burrow its way into soil somewhere, germinate, and grow into a new plant. If a seed gets digested by an animal, guess what? The seed failed. So seeds have defenses – lots of them. (Fruit is an entirely different matter – its preferred method of spreading seeds is through animal feces, and thus fruits have co-evolved with animals to delight the taste buds and nourish the body.)

Whole grains, however, are grasses, and prefer to spread seeds via the wind and simple gravity. Whole grains have all of the seeds’ built-in defenses still intact, including all kinds of compounds designed to damage you and prevent you from fully digesting the seed. Grasses can't run away like animals can, and they don't have claws or sharp teeth, so they defend themselves with chemical weapons instead. These chemicals make you sick and mineral-deficient, or at least prevent you from getting any nutritional



value out of the seed, in the hopes that you'll stop eating it. Humans first started refining grains to get around all these chemical barbs, and make the grains easier to digest and assimilate, but recently we've swung back to eating the whole seed, because of some well-meaning (but misguided) ideas about fiber. Fiber is for old people with bowels that don't work. By some accounts, high-fiber whole grains make you fiber-dependent, because you have so much fibrous bulk pushing fecal matter through your intestines that your poop-moving muscles forget how to do their job. Whole-grain fiber can also be very sharp, and rips miniscule tears in your intestines as it travels through. You get plenty of fiber from vegetables and fruits – the soft, soluble kind of fiber, completely safe for your intestines – so skip the whole grains. Your acne will be better for it, too, because you won’t have the problem of whole grains leaching important acne-preventing minerals like zinc and magnesium from your body.

Whole wheat is really about the worst grain you can eat. Not only are you blocked from digesting and assimilating much of the protein, starch and minerals by all the seed’s built-in defenses, you also get gluten to deal with, which most people can't fully digest either. As I mentioned earlier, gluten wreaks havoc in your intestines and unleashes a torrent of auto-immune disease precursors, including – that’s right! – inflammation and acne. So grab your ass and toss the wheat flakes in the compost, and you’ll be two steps and a leap closer to clear skin.

Beans & Legumes

Beans are like grains, in that they’re also seeds. They defend themselves with enzyme inhibitors, phytates and other nasty toxins so that you won’t try to eat them. They use amylase and protease inhibitors to prevent you from digesting their starch and protein, and then selfishly guard their minerals with phytic acid so you can't absorb them. (This is why the Nutrition Facts labels on grains and beans are so misleading, because they



have absolutely no regard for whether we can actually absorb the vitamins and minerals.) Phytic acid also accounts for why beans give you gas, and for why you have to process or cook the bejeezus out of beans to be able to eat them. Even then, they are starch-dense and nutrient-poor; in other words, a low-quality food.

This includes soy, in all forms. Soybeans, tofu, soybean oil – if it came from the soybean plant, don’t touch it. The “healthy soy” idea is a huge marketing scam perpetrated by the soy industry to help move product, to convince people that soy is a “health food” so that they will trip over themselves to buy this lucrative cash crop in the form of tofu, tempeh, soy milk, soy yogurt, soy oil, soy-based fake meat, and everything in between.

Here’s a few facts about soy that they didn’t tell you. Soy:

Inhibits zinc absorption (a key nutrient for clear skin)

Impairs cognition

Increases your risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease

Mimics estrogen, causing hormonal problems and altering menstrual patterns (and hormonal problems lead to acne)

Doubles the risk of infants getting diabetes later

Depresses thyroid function, magnifying the toxicity of fluoride in your water supply

Inhibits dopamine function

Makes it more difficult to form new memories

Increases the risk of birthing a deformed or disabled child

I could keep going, but how many reasons do you need to stay away from this poisonous substance?



In sum, beans also contribute to acne in a number of different ways. Fortunately, I don't know many people who really just love beans, but if you really can't live without them, then eat them once in a while but know that every fart is a pimple in disguise.

For Vegetarians and Vegans

While my personal beliefs are that eating a vegetarian or vegan diet is not optimal for health,37 I respect the humanitarian and ecological reasons for doing so, and I respect your freedom to make your own choices. If you choose to avoid meat and/or eggs for ethical, environmental reasons, or otherwise, you will find the method of eating in this book a bit more difficult.

Here’s what I recommend: avoid the Top Four Worst Foods completely (dairy, sugar, vegetable oils, and gluten), and when you eat grains and beans, process them in such a way as to remove the phytates, enzyme inhibitors, aflatoxin, and lectins. One of the most effective methods of processing grains is to soak the whole grains first before you cook them. Quinoa, brown rice, buckwheat, amaranth, millet, and all the other non-gluten grains are great options. Soak these grains overnight, preferably in an acid medium: cover them with water and add some lemon juice, vinegar, whey, yogurt, kefir, or buttermilk for acidity. After they’re done soaking, rinse them with water to get rid of the released anti-nutrients, and then cook them as you normally would.38

Sprouted grains are even better. Sprouted and then fermented grains are the best, producing the healthiest and most digestible form of grains; this method has been used for thousands of years by traditional cultures all around the world. Fermenting grains is not always practical, but sprouting is actually quite easy. You can buy your own home-sprouting kit39 and be eating fresh, nutrient-rich sprouts in no time.



8

So What Can I Eat?

We’ve covered a lot of this already, and I’ll go over some greater detail in a minute. But first, the Master List. In the column labeled “CLEAR SKIN,” you’ll find a wealth of foods that promote clear skin and heal acne. In the column labeled “ACNE,” you’ll find all the foods that you’ll want to avoid, as they’ll make your acne worse and slow your progress.

Okay, here we go...

Note: this is not intended to be a “be-all, end-all” codex. It is simply a guideline, albeit a well-researched one. If anything seems wrong to you, research it. Look it up on Google. Likewise, this list is far from comprehensive – if there’s a particular food you can’t find on the list, don’t panic! Try to fit it in based on your intuition, and do a little internet research if you get stuck, or shoot me an email at [email protected].





The Master List of Clear Skin Foods

* indicates foods to be used with extreme caution, and only in very small amounts

CATEGORY CLEAR SKIN ACNE

DAIRY ✓ hard cheeses* (small amounts, raw only)

✓ heavy cream* (raw, grass-fed only)

✓ plain yogurt* (raw, full-fat)

milk

cheese

sweetened yogurts

all pasteurized dairy

MEAT ✓ all seafood (wild-caught only)

✓ wild game

✓ free-range chicken & eggs

✓ grass-fed beef

✓ grass-fed lamb

✓ marrow bones

✓ organs & offal

all feedlot-raised meat

processed meats (salami, pepperoni, ham, bacon)

“mystery meat” (fish sticks, chicken fingers)

McDonald’s




FATS ✓ butter (yes, butter)

✓ coconut milk and oil

✓ lard (yes, lard)

✓ walnut oil

✓ avocado oil

✓ olive oil

✓ red palm oil

✓ ghee

margarine

shortening

canola oil

safflower oil

sunflower oil

soybean oil

corn oil

cottonseed oil

VEGETABLES ✓ broccoli

✓ kale

✓ cabbage

✓ brussels sprouts

✓ cauliflower (white and purple)

✓ kohlrabi

✓ beets

✓ carrots (all colors)

✓ kelp (kombu, arame, wakame, dulse)

✓ squash

✓ red peppers

✓ sweet potatoes (go for the dark orange ones)

✓ mushrooms

✓ pretty much all other fresh vegetables (go for a rainbow of colors)

canned vegetables (added sodium, preservatives)

potatoes (high glycemic)




HERBS & SPICES

(Note: fresh herbs and spices are always better, but dried is good too, as long as they’re organic, or at least non-irradiated)

✓ ginger

✓ turmeric

✓ rosemary

✓ basil

✓ garlic

✓ oregano

✓ sage

✓ cracked pepper

✓ cayenne pepper

✓ cinnamon

✓ nutmeg

✓ cloves

✓ cardamom

✓ cilantro

✓ parsley

irradiated herbs

excessive salt

MSG

food coloring

preservatives




FRUITS

(fruits in the “Acne” category have a high glycemic load and should be avoided)

✓ blueberries

✓ raspberries

✓ strawberries

✓ cherries

✓ açaí

✓ goji berries

✓ pomegranates

✓ lemons

✓ wine grapes

✓ apples

✓ peaches

✓ nectarines

✓ plums

✓ avocados

✓ blackcurrants

✓ guavas

✓ pineapple (fresh)

✓ lemons

✓ limes

✓ oranges

✓ papaya

✓ quince

✓ rhubarb

bananas

mangoes

dates

lychee

table grapes

persimmons

raisins

dried fruit




NUTS & SEEDS

✓ brazil nuts

✓ macadamias

✓ almonds

✓ walnuts

✓ hazelnuts

✓ pine nuts

✓ sesame seeds

✓ pumpkin seeds

✓ chia seeds

✓ nut butters (any of the above)

Planter’s

all roasted nuts and seeds

peanuts (actually legumes, not nuts)

peanut butter

toasted sesame seeds

SWEETS

Honey, dark chocolate, and unsweetened fruit preserves must be eaten in extreme moderation. They still have a high glycemic index.

✓ honey* (raw, unheated, unfiltered)

✓ dark chocolate* (at least 70%)

✓ unsweetened fruit preserves*

refined honey

white sugar

brown sugar

molasses

palm sugar

date sugar

turbinado sugar

coconut sugar

agave syrup

stevia

corn syrup

maple syrup




GRAINS & FLOURS

✓ coconut flour

✓ almond flour

wheat

rye

barley

oats

millet

amaranth

brown rice

white rice

corn flour

tapioca starch

sorghum flour

BEANS & LEGUMES

✓ (none) all beans

all lentils

peas

peanuts

cashews

BEVERAGES ✓ red wine (one glass per day)

✓ green tea

✓ white tea

✓ herbal tea

✓ water

coffee

black tea

fruit juice

soft drinks

energy drinks

beer

alcohol

Along with this book, you should have gotten a separate PDF file of this list so you can easily print it out and stick it on the fridge or take it with you to the grocery store.



How NOT To Use This List

As I mentioned earlier, this list is absolutely not “The Holy Bible of What Thou Shalt Eat and What Thou Shalt Avoid Like the Plague.” This list represents an ideal scenario. For most people, the “ideal scenario” is just that – an ideal – and sometimes an impractical or prohibitively difficult one. People get so uptight about idealistic diets, worrying that if they “slip” even once, all their efforts will have been wasted. (I often fall into this trap myself, and I’m learning to control it.) This is just plain wrong. The healthier you eat, the better your acne will get – it’s a spectrum, not black and white. The point is, do the best you can.

If you find yourself absolutely lusting over bread, or your friend bakes cookies and you can’t say no, then don’t say no. Indulge once in a while if you feel the urge. Make the choices for yourself. Some people work better sticking 100% to the plan, finding that they tumble down a slippery slope if they indulge just once; others do fine taking breaks from time to time to indulge, and yet still manage to stay on track 90% of the time. Bottom line: it’s your life, so do what you want. Experiment, see what works for you, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise. Your own experience is your best teacher.

Organic vs. Conventional

You’ve heard this before: go organic. Organic produce is generally packed more densely with nutrients, and doesn’t have all those endocrine-disrupting, hormone-emulating pesticides that conventional produce is loaded with. Pesticides not only disrupt your hormones, but also create free radicals that damage your skin in the same way that trans fats do. A great place to find cheap organic produce in bulk is your local farmers’ market. You might also try getting a CSA box – it’s cheap and saves time! And you’ll get



a bunch of interesting foods that take some creativity to use, and will expand your culinary vocabulary.

By some accounts, it’s more important to go organic when choosing meats, because pesticides bio-accumulate in animal tissues. Imagine a cow eating 30 pounds of pesticide-laden hay every day, and you can see why. The pesticides build up in the animal’s fat stores, giving you a mega-dose of pesticides when you finally eat the meat. Compare that to just eating a red pepper that’s been sprayed with pesticides, and the magnitude of the problem becomes clear. Whenever possible, choose meats from animals that have been raised on pesticide-free feeds. (Organic, 100% grass-fed meat is by far the best option.)

Now, if it’s make-or-break between getting organic and conventional, of course go conventional. Eating fresh produce will still do your acne worlds of good, even if it has some pesticide residues.

Even better, here’s a list of the “Dirty Dozen,” the twelve foods that get the worst pesticide treatment – and consequently foods you should buy organic:40

Apples

Celery

Strawberries

Peaches

Spinach

Nectarines

Grapes

Bell peppers

Potatoes



Blueberries

Lettuce

Collard greens

And here’s the list of “Clean” foods, the produce items that rarely get pesticide treatments, and that you don’t have to worry about buying organic:41

✓ Onions

✓ Sweet corn

✓ Pineapples

✓ Avocado

✓ Asparagus

✓ Sweet peas

✓ Mangoes

✓ Eggplant

✓ Cantaloupe

✓ Kiwi

✓ Cabbage

✓ Watermelon

✓ Sweet potatoes

✓ Grapefruit

✓ Mushrooms



Note: some of these foods are on the “Acne Foods” list, and should be avoided at the beginning when you’re trying to get your acne under control. This is simply an overall reference for organic vs. conventional produce, and not specific to which foods contribute to inflammation and acne and which foods combat them.

Hidden Ingredients

Also, keep in mind that many of the things you find in the grocery store are processed foods, including sauces, breads, crackers, cookies, cakes, baked goods, dips, frozen dinners, instant soups, canned meals, and all manner of other concoctions. You have to read the ingredients. Just because a jar of pasta sauce says “100% Natural” doesn’t mean it’s going to cure acne. To this day, I have immense difficulty finding pasta sauces without sugar; so I choose to make my own, with fresh tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh rosemary, olive oil, olives, mushrooms, cracked pepper, lemon, and plenty of garlic. And let me tell you, it’s a world of difference.

This is a theme: the more you make your own meals, using raw, whole-food ingredients from the organic and free-range sections of your grocery store – or better yet, your local farmers’ market – the more control you’ll have over what you put in your body, the faster you’ll cure your acne, and the healthier you’ll be. Not to mention that flavors are more intense, textures are crisper, and roasts are more savory when you make them yourself. Skip the restaurants, skip the pre-made meals; if you absolutely don’t have time, either pick up a time management book (Getting Things Done by David Allen is one of the best), or go to the deli at Whole Foods or your local organic grocery. They’re more likely to use “Clear Skin” foods and less likely to sneak in “Acne” foods, but you still have to be careful and read the ingredient lists.



Eat Like Royalty

Another important thing to keep in mind: we’re not interested in deprivation diets here. Deprivation diets set you up to fail – in fact they practically guarantee it, because of the way the human brain works. If your subconscious desires and cravings aren’t met, they will easily overpower any rules or guidelines in your head. So we’re going to focus on ways to reduce these cravings, and to help you get more satisfaction than you’ve ever gotten out of food before – satisfaction that runs the gamut from the surface level of taste all the way to the deepest cellular level.

The best way to guarantee your success with this way of eating – the best way to eat your way to clear skin – is to eat relatively low-carb. And if you look at the list above, you’ll have no trouble eating low-carb if you stick to the “Clear Skin” foods and avoid the “Acne” foods. I don’t have space to go into all the science of low-carb diets here, as the subject merits an entire book in itself – check the Resource Guide for some excellent books on the topic. What’s important for us is that lowering your carbohydrate intake accomplishes two main goals:

✓ It reduces cravings, making it easier to stay the course with this diet.

✓ It reduces inflammation, by controlling your blood sugar and insulin, and thereby reduces acne.

If you’ve never tried eating low-carb before, the basic thing to keep in mind is that you have to replace those carbs with satisfying foods, so that you don’t deprive your body of calories and satisfaction. That means don’t eat just a salad for lunch, unless you load it with olive oil, chicken, salmon, olives, almonds, walnuts, and avocados. That means eat a lot of fat and a lot of protein. Eat lots of fatty meat, lots of healthy oils and fats, lots of fish, and modest amounts of nuts and seeds (no more than a handful or two per



day). You are not depriving yourself with this style of eating – you’re giving yourself the most nourishing, satisfying, delicious food you’ve ever eaten.

(Note: if you find yourself getting low in energy after a week of eating low-carb, try adding more sweet potatoes or even some brown rice – just make sure to soak the brown rice overnight before you cook it, as this will deactivate much of the damaging phytates and enzyme inhibitors. Some people’s bodies just need more calories to enjoy optimum energy levels – I am one of those people myself, so I make sure to eat some starchy vegetables, root vegetables, sweet potatoes, and soaked brown rice.)

(Another note: If you eat this way, and you currently weigh more than you would like to, you will notice your weight drop off effortlessly as your acne goes away. No calorie-counting, I promise. It really, really works.)

This style of eating takes a deep shift in perspective. That will take time. Here are a few ideas, though: think red curry, with vegetables, shrimp and

loads of coconut milk; or try acorn squash doused in butter and cinnamon, alongside a cardamom-spiced pork roast. Or king crab legs in a butter-lemon sauce, with steamed mussels and tomato-basil bisque.

One of my typical lunches: red curry with shrimp, vegetables, and loads o’ coconut milk



Bottom line: live it up. Low-fat, calorie-restriction diets are for masochists. But that’s not us. No, we’re going to eat like royalty.

Tricks to Save Money

You might be asking, “But I’m not royalty! How can I afford all this? Organic produce and grass-fed meat is so expensive!” This is an excuse, cleverly disguised as a legitimate complaint. I apologize if I sound harsh; my goal in writing this course is not to make friends, but to help you cure your acne, once and for all. Saying you can't afford to buy high-quality food is like saying you don't have time for your kids. You have to make time, by siphoning it off from other activities like watching TV and fooling around on Facebook. Similarly, you can easily make money by cutting unnecessary costs, making your own lunch instead of eating out, and saving loads of money on medical bills that you won't need to pay anymore because not only do you have clear skin, but you're in ultimate health too, and you don’t get sick. If the money thing is still a sticking point for you, here’s a few ways to get creative:

✓ Buy fish straight from the fishermen (or the fishmongers at the market)

✓ Buy meat from a local farm or meat-share in large amounts, like an eighth of a cow, and store it in your chest freezer

✓ Get an organic CSA box

✓ Scout out deals at your local farmers’ market

✓ Eat canned fish instead of fresh fish – sardines in olive oil, mackerel in water, herring in tomato sauce, or salmon with bones (stay away from tuna – it’s loaded with mercury and PCBs). You can make delicious dishes with canned fish with paprika, olive oil, fresh herbs, olives, eggs, and a little creativity!



✓ Buy grass-fed organs and soup bones from your local butcher or grocery – they’re cheaper, and packed with way more nutrients than expensive lean cuts of meat.

There are tons of ways to eat this way on a shoestring – I’m sure you can come up with loads more if you set your mind to it. A few other things to ask yourself: how much are you paying for acne medications now? How much does laser scar removal cost? How much life energy and happiness does acne cost you every day, every month, every year? Consider buying healthy, organic food an investment in your health, for now and for the rest of your life. It's worth it, and will really be worth it in a few decades, when your pizza-eating, Coke-guzzling friends get clogged arteries, arthritis, diabetes, and thinning hair. Invest in yourself. This is like health insurance, except more fun.

Benefits of Butter

To make things easier, I hereby give you license to eat as much butter as you want, as long as it’s grass-fed. Look for Kerrygold or Organic Valley Pasture Butter, or raid your local farmers’ market. Salted is fine – it tastes better, and the amount of salt is negligible in the grand scheme of things. You might be asking yourself, “Surely butter isn’t a health food?” And I answer, contrary to popular wisdom, butter does not give you heart disease or cancer, and in fact protects against these, along with a host of other benefits:

✓ Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in grass-fed butter fights cancer

✓ Fat-soluble vitamins A, E, and K cool inflammation

✓ Anti-stiffness factor protects your joints



✓ Activator X helps your body absorb minerals

✓ Antioxidants fight free radical damage

Special note about CLA: this healthy fatty acid has strong anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties. But butter made from grain-fed cows has very little CLA in it. In fact, grass-fed butter contains 300-500% the amount of CLA as conventional grain-fed butter.

For more on butter, go here:

http://paleodietlifestyle.com/the-many-virtues-of-butter/

Eat butter. Lots of it. If you have trouble eating enough vegetables like I do, try cooking them in butter, and then douse them in butter again before you eat them. You will suddenly start looking forward to eating those vegetables. Butter truly makes everything better – from eating vegetables to curing acne.

Educate Yourself

To learn more about this style of eating, and even more importantly, about what to cook, I urge you to pick up a few of the diet / cookbooks listed in the Resource Guide. Three fantastic places to start are Deep Nutrition, Nourishing Traditions, and Primal Body, Primal Mind.

Trust me: eating this way takes some getting used to, but it is not hard to maintain. My food tastes richer and better, I feel full and satisfied and no longer have the urge to snack between meals, and I don’t have to eat as often so I free up time that I used to spend buying and cooking food. And most importantly, my acne stays away.





9

Supplements

I’ll say it once: supplements are crutches. They are a temporary solution, while you work on getting the real underlying problem fixed – your diet and lifestyle. Some people use supplements to great effect, and some people skip them entirely and just go straight to the heart of the problem. It’s up to you.

In the long run, though, if you take supplements but keep eating the same acne-causing diet, it’s like having a broken leg that never heals; you have to keep using crutches forever. If you stop using crutches, you can’t walk. It’s the same with supplements and acne; if you stop using them, your acne comes back, unless you heal the deep, underlying problems. (Plus, crutches are a pain in the ass. So are pills. You want to get to the point where you don’t have to take any pills at all, where you don’t need crutches, where you’re running free like Forrest Gump.)

If you do take supplements, remember this: the supplement industry is primarily motivated by profits, just like the dairy and grain industries, and just like tobacco companies. It’s important to understand that supplement companies capitalize on the widespread fear in people that key nutrients might be missing, and thus they must take supplements in order to be healthy. However, by eating the diet outlined in this course, you are virtually guaranteeing that you will exceed recommended daily intakes (RDIs) of all vitamins and minerals every single day. Personally, I average 300% or more on all RDIs by following this diet. So, for the most part, supplements are a waste of your money. As I explained earlier, when you divorce nutrients from their whole-food contexts, you deprive yourself of the complex network of



enzymes and co-factors that aid in assimilation and amplify the effectiveness of the target nutrient.

That said, there are a few key supplements that acne sufferers typically benefit from. In fact, some people cure their acne completely simply by taking the following three supplements. After everything I just said, though, why would I be recommending supplements now? Well, because of our modern food landscape and lifestyles, we are likely to be deficient in the following three nutrients, all of which play a huge role in acne prevention.

Omega-3s (EPA)

One of the most common mistakes here is taking flax oil for omega-3 benefits. The problem is, flax oil has plenty of ALA, or alpha-linoleic acid, but it doesn’t actually contain EPA or DHA, the animal-derived forms of omega-3 fatty acids. And of all omega-3 fatty acids, EPA has the strongest anti-inflammatory effect, and this is really the one that matters most for acne.

Flax oil is commonly touted as a healthy “omega-3” oil, but the reality is that it doesn’t have nearly the same inflammation-reducing benefits as EPA. And contrary to popular belief, your body cannot synthesize EPA or DHA – you need to ingest them.42 Chickens, on the other hand, can synthesize EPA and DHA when they are fed flaxseed – so buy omega-3 eggs instead of normal eggs. The best source of EPA, of course, is fatty fish and fish oil.

Here are some of the other benefits of true, animal-derived EPA in healing acne:

✓ Reduces redness and puffiness of acne lesions

✓ Increases skin cell hydration, making your skin softer

✓ Reduces stress, cutting off excess oil production in the skin



✓ Reduces skin cell overproduction, preventing pores from clogging

✓ Balances hormone production, especially androgens, reducing oil production

Fish oil is the most potent natural source of EPA available. Typical fish oil, unconcentrated, is about 20% EPA by volume.

There are many other reasons besides acne to take fish oil:

✓ Less joint pain

✓ Improved mood43,44

✓ Reduced depression

✓ Stronger, fuller hair

✓ Better brain function

✓ Improved fertility in men45

✓ More energy

✓ Improved focus and alertness46

✓ Improved cholesterol

✓ Fat loss47,48

That's a key theme in this course – by improving your acne, you're going to be greatly improving your overall health as well. And fish oil can be a huge factor in that.

This is important: if you suffer from depression, it’s especially critical that you take fish oil. New research is starting to show that depression actually shares some of the same root causes as acne – including inflammation.49,50 This is a breakthrough finding, which starts to illuminate the complex acne-



depression-brain-inflammation relationship. By treating one with fish oil, you can treat both, because they’re synergistically linked.

A note on dosage: recommended intakes on fish oil bottles are far too low to see significant acne-healing benefits. To get the maximum benefit from fish oil's powerful anti-acne properties, aim for 10 one-gram fish oil capsules every day, or 3-4 tsp of liquid fish oil.

That's going to give you 1.5-2.0g of EPA every day. Beyond this amount, there's no scientific data to support any further benefit.

Stay away from cod liver oil. Cod liver oil is packed with vitamin A, which sounds like a good thing, except that it’s possible to reach toxic levels of this vitamin if you consume cod liver oil every day. Stick to regular fish oil, or fish oil concentrate. (If you go the fish oil concentrate route, make sure you adjust your dosage so you still get 1.5-2.0g of EPA every day.)

Other tips: look for fish oil capsules that are tested free of PCBs and mercury. In today's polluted oceans, fish bioaccumulate all sorts of nasty chemicals and heavy metals into their fatty tissues, so it's critical to get fish oil that's tested free of these harmful substances. (“Tested free” usually means the levels of mercury and PCBs are in fact detectable, but are so vanishingly small that your body will have no trouble detoxifying and eliminating them.)

A word of warning: when you start taking fish oil, you may experience "fishy burps." This happens to a select few. The solution is simple: switch to "enteric-coated" fish oil capsules. This type of capsule passes through your stomach intact, only breaking down when it reaches your small intestine. This usually prevents fishy burps.

It doesn’t matter what brand you buy, as long as it says it’s been tested free of mercury and PCBs.



Unless you eat fish at least a few times a week, make a point to take fish oil – it’s one of the fastest, most powerful supplements you can take to start improving your acne. Note that fish oil is a stopgap measure; once you get into the rhythm of eating described in this book, you won’t need to take fish oil, because you won’t be creating any new acne in the first place.

Vitamin D

How good would an acne book be if it didn’t talk about vitamin D?

Excuse the rhyme. In all seriousness, liquid sunshine, also known as vitamin D, plays a major role in healing and preventing acne, and chances are that you’re not getting enough of it. In fact, serum vitamin D levels have been steadily declining over a number of decades, and 75% of American adults are clinically deficient. Here’s what vitamin D does for you, and why you should be very concerned if you’re not getting enough. Vitamin D:

✓ Boosts your immune system, often fighting off flu infections as effectively as flu shots

✓ Improves mood, fights depression

✓ Cools inflammation, reducing acne

✓ Allows you to absorb calcium, preventing osteoporosis (vitamin D is required for this)

✓ Fights cancer by taming the wild reproduction of cancer cells

✓ Reduces respiratory infections

✓ Reduces wrinkles and makes your skin soft, strong, and smooth (the “glow”)

✓ Relieves body aches by reducing muscle spasms



✓ Prevents diabetes by controlling your insulin response (also benefiting acne)

You must get enough of this vitamin, for your health and longevity, and especially for your acne. Your body makes all the vitamin D it needs for a few days in just 10-15 minutes of full-body sun exposure (think: swimsuit), depending on your latitude and skin pigmentation. The darker your skin, and further away from the equator you live, the longer you’ll need to stay in the sun. Avoid most sunscreens, as they prevents your skin from producing vitamin D, poison your skin with parabens, chemicals, and preservatives, and clog your pores. I only use sunscreen after I’ve been in the sun long enough to get my maximum vitamin D dose for the day (well before sunburn), and I only use oil-free, non-comedogenic suncreens, with no parabens or other harmful chemicals. They’re more expensive, but they lessen the toxic load on your body, which is a chief concern for any acne sufferer.

On any day that you don’t get sunshine – which for most people will be the majority of days – take a vitamin D supplement. This is one of the only supplements you’ll find me recommend in this whole course. Vitamin D is just too critical to your health to skimp on, and too many people live in rainy, cloudy climates for much of the year to be able to get enough vitamin D naturally. (Take it from me – I grew up in Seattle, grey and rainy capital of the States!)

Look for vitamin D3 at around a 5,000 IU concentration per pill, and take one per day. As of 2011, the FDA’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamin D is a paltry 400 IU, but the latest research shows that this is not even close to your body’s actual need, and there are groups of concerned scientists trying to lobby the FDA to raise their recommended intake. In just 10-15 minutes of sun exposure, your skin produces 10,000 IU of vitamin D, so taking 5,000 IU per day is absolutely no problem. And you don’t have to



worry about toxicity, because you’d need to take over 50,000 IU per day for several months before approaching toxic levels.51

(Make sure you’re getting cholecalciferol, also known as vitamin D3. You may run across ergocalciferol, or vitamin D2, but the majority of the current research suggests that vitamin D3 is much more potent and effective.)

Zinc

Zinc, like vitamin D, is a key factor in acne, so you want to make sure you’re getting enough. Zinc is a trace mineral essential to all forms of life because of its fundamental role in gene expression, cell development and replication.52 Zinc is the 24th most abundant element in the Earth's crust. It’s also the second most common trace mineral in the body. And yet, according to a 2004 study by the World Health Organization, 31.7% of the world’s population is zinc-deficient.53 That’s more than two billion people.

Zinc deficiency is especially common in people who eat large amounts of beans, legumes, and whole grains. These foods contain phytic acid, which binds zinc to itself and prevents you from absorbing it. Vegetarians and vegans are at an even greater risk for zinc deficiency, because the zinc from plant foods is four times more difficult to absorb than zinc from meat.54

Symptoms of zinc deficiency include:

frequent colds or infections

white spots on your fingernails

dry skin

hangnails

hair loss



increased allergies

diarrhea

loss of sex drive

infertility

slow wound healing

acne

While the exact mechanisms are unknown, zinc most likely benefits acne by ferrying vitamin A from your liver to your skin and by regulating your body’s hormonal balance.55 In addition, a recent study found that zinc facilitates apoptosis, or pre-programmed cell death, which is a natural part of your skin renewing itself; if apoptosis is delayed, as in the case of zinc deficiency, skin cells stick together instead of dying and sloughing off like they should, which leads to clogged pores.56 (Like zinc, isotretinoin, the active ingredient in Accutane, also uses this mechanism of cell apoptosis to treat acne.57)

Finally, zinc powerfully influences gene expression, making it a key weapon in our epigenetic arsenal.58

How do you know if you're zinc deficient? Well, unfortunately, zincblood tests are notoriously unreliable, because zinc is found mostlyinside cells rather than in the blood. The best thing to do is to boost your zinc intake for a few weeks, and if your acne improves, it's safe to say you might have been deficient.

You’ve got three choices here:

✓ Eat foods high in zinc

✓ Supplement zinc

✓ Both



I recommend the third option. Zinc is incredibly difficult to absorb on the whole, so making sure you get enough is vitally important. Supplementing with zinc can quickly benefit acne-prone skin, and because zinc deficiency rates are so high, you don’t have much to lose. That said, I don’t consider supplementing zinc to be a long-term solution, for the same reason I advise against most supplements – it’s a quick fix, and since it’s isolated from the naturally-occurring co-factor and enzyme complex found in whole foods, you probably won’t absorb it or use it as well as zinc from whole foods. But it’s a good idea for a month or two.

At this point, it seems that the most easily absorbed form is zinc picolinate, much more so than zinc gluconate or zinc citrate. This is because your body forms zinc picolinate naturally from foods – zinc combines in the intestines with picolinic acid, which is secreted by the pancreas. This is a compound requiring vitamin B6 for production. The zinc picolinate complex is then transported across the absorptive cells of the intestine, then to the liver where some is stored.

If you can't find zinc picolinate in your local health food orsupplement store, order it from Amazon. Take 25-40mg per day for the maximum benefit. Make sure you don’t exceed 50mg per day, because you’ll risk copper deficiency.59

Note: do not take zinc on an empty stomach. It frequently causes nausea unless taken with food. So take it mid-way through a meal or right after, and you'll most likely prevent nausea. Zinc picolinate, in comparison to other forms, is also the easiest on the stomach – another reason to choose this form over zinc citrate or gluconate.

You might also want to increase your whole-food zinc intake:

BEST SOURCES (high concentration and easy to absorb):



✓ Oysters

✓ Chicken, turkey, all poultry

✓ Clams

✓ Liver

✓ Pork

✓ Salmon

✓ Beef

✓ Lamb

MODERATE SOURCES (high concentration, but difficult to absorb):

✓ Spirulina

✓ Sunflower seeds

✓ Pumpkin seeds

✓ Nuts



10

Digestion and Gut Health

With recent science, we’re beginning to see a critical relationship between having a healthy gut and enjoying clear skin. A 2008 study done on over 13,000 adolescents found that acne sufferers are much more likely to have gastrointestinal problems, including constipation, bloating, low stomach acid, acid reflux and halitosis (bad breath).60 No direct studies have been done on acne sufferers and gut flora, but a related study on rosacea illuminated a possible key factor: it’s called “small intestinal bacterial overgrowth”, or SIBO for short.61

Here’s how it works: normally, your small intestine is densely populated with beneficial bacteria that help to break down food, transform nutrients into new ones that the human body can’t synthesize by itself (e.g. vitamin B12), and protect the delicate lining of the small intestine.

However, a mix of factors can cause an overgrowth of harmful bacteria in your small intestine, resulting in a die-off of your beneficial-bacteria warriors, and hence the term “small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.” The symptoms of SIBO? Bloating, diarrhea, malnutrition, malabsorption, and weight loss. Oh, and acne. Big time. I’ll get to that in a minute.

SIBO causes a cascade of negative effects, including intestinal permeability. If you’ll remember, intestinal permeability means that food particles can actually pass through the intestinal wall and into your blood stream, causing a hyperactive immune response, auto-inflammatory disease, and systemic inflammation – a severe cause of acne.



What causes SIBO? According to one study, causes include constipation, low stomach acid, and a compromised immune system.62 You can see a cyclic pattern here – these are the same problems that were found in acne sufferers in the 2008 study mentioned above. The reality is, these problems are not actually causes of SIBO; they are links in a chain of events beginning with diet and lifestyle, as is SIBO itself.

Here’s an example of a real cause: stress. A stressful job, a stressful commute, a stressful relationship, even watching the news – it doesn’t matter, it all contributes. Stress kills off Lactobacilli, beneficial bacteria in the gut, and allows bacteria such as E. coli to move up into the small intestine, multiply rapidly, and cause problems. (E. coli occurs naturally in the large intestine, but in relatively small numbers; it starts to cause damage when it multiplies out of proportion and moves up into the small intestine.) According to a 2008 study done in Sweden, "intestinal bacteria have the ability to sense a stressed host and up-regulate their virulence factors when opportunity knocks."63 These “virulence factors” are toxic by-products produced by these harmful bacteria, and they cause unchecked inflammation. In short? When you're stressed out, bad bacteria in your intestine multiply unchecked and turn nasty, leading to a cascade of problems that eventually leads to acne.

Stress also slows down intestinal motility, leading to constipation – another factor in SIBO, and another gastrointestinal problem commonly associated with acne.

The study citing constipation as a cause of SIBO is misleading, because constipation itself is an effect of diet and stress. Eating dairy, eating too much grain-based insoluble fiber, not ingesting a proper balance of calcium, magnesium, and potassium, and general stress are the real causes of constipation, which in turn leads to SIBO, and eventually to acne.

The gut-acne relationship is complex, as is acne as a whole; but that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. By eating the diet prescribed in this book, managing



stress, taking vitamin D, zinc, and fish oil, and following the other tips in Chapter 11, you will be giving your gut the tools and resources it needs to heal itself, restore optimal digestion, and thereby improve your skin.

If you fail to see results after these changes, or you still experience gastrointestinal problems, consider supplementing with probiotics to restore gut health.64 One of the highest-quality probiotic supplements currently available is made in Japan; each batch undergoes a 3-year culturing process, and the specific mix of bacteria is more complex and effective than most brands of probiotic supplements. The brand is called “Dr. Ohhira’s Probiotics” and can be found on Amazon.com. It’s more expensive, but it’s worth it. If cost is an issue, go with a cheaper brand with a 5-star review on Amazon (after many years of buying products online, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Amazon star rating is one of the most reliable judges of quality out there). Again, this is a last resort; I typically advise against supplements because they’re expensive and a pain in the ass to take every day.

A better solution might be to simply eat more fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and kombucha. I’ve taken quite a liking to sauerkraut, and kombucha is now one of my favorite drinks. The kimchi served at authentic Korean restaurants is to die for. When you buy fermented foods, make sure you’re getting “live” bacteria – much commercial sauerkraut, for example, has been pasteurized before bottling, killing all the beneficial bacteria. Check your local health food store, as they tend to stock all manner of strange but delicious fermented foods, with an emphasis on the “live” food factor.

In summary, eating the wrong foods, not getting a proper calcium/magnesium/potassium balance, and getting stressed all contribute to SIBO and impaired gut health. Your digestion suffers, bacteria multiply wildly in your small intestine and cause problems, and you get acne. Restoring proper gut health is paramount for curing acne. By following the diet and supplement recommendations in this book, your gut health with most likely restore automatically; you can supplement probiotics if you need extra help.



11

The Last Few Keys to Clear Skin

For most of this book, I’ve focused predominantly on diet. And while diet is perhaps the biggest player in acne, there are a few other important lifestyle points that you won’t want to miss. Try combining the above food guidelines with the lifestyle choices below, and you’ll be acne-free in the shortest possible amount of time.

Sleep

Getting enough sleep is absolutely critical to achieving and maintaining clear skin. A 2007 study found that insufficient sleep is a “significant risk factor” for acne.65 A 2011 study, following 1,236 acne patients, confirmed this result.66 The exact mechanism is unknown, but looking at the well-documented negative effects of sleep deprivation, we can make some guesses. Lack of sleep is associated with:67

✓ an impaired immune system

✓ obesity

✓ increased diabetes risk

✓ depression

✓ increased levels of stress hormones

And all of these things are implicated in acne as well:



✓ An impaired immune system means you can’t fight off P. acnes bacteria obesity makes you insulin-resistant and raises your baseline blood sugar levels, contributing to glycation and oxidative stress

✓ Diabetes means you’re already highly insulin-resistant, meaning your blood sugar spikes very strongly, signaling your skin to produce more sebum and more pore-clogging keratinocytes

✓ Depression has roots in inflammation, which we’ll discuss in a moment

✓ Stress hormones, as we will see next, can also worsen acne

Stress

Stress causes acne – you’ve probably heard this before, or you know it to be true from personal experience. Stress causes complex hormonal changes in your body, involving the adrenal glands, androgens, and cortisol, which together mimic the acne-producing activity of IGF-1. These hormones stimulate excess sebum production, and can put the body into a serious chronic state of inflammation.

Here’s one way that stress causes acne: stress releases cortisol, a hormone designed to block insulin from shuttling glucose into the muscles, so that you can burn the glucose for energy immediately instead of storing it (fueling the “fight-or-flight” response). In effect, cortisol makes your cells insulin-resistant.68 However, when cortisol is always elevated – like when you’re chronically stressed out – you get constant insulin-resistance. Your pancreas struggles to pump out enough insulin, but your blood sugar stays high because your cells don’t answer the door when insulin knocks. So you get chronically elevated insulin on top of high blood sugar, a dangerous combination that sets the stage for clogged pores, inflammation, glycation, oxidative damage, and everything we talked about in Chapter 2.



Adding insult to injury, stress dampens your immune system, blocking the production of T-cells. That means your body gets deprived of its immune-cell warriors, and will struggle to fight off foreign invaders, get rid of damaged cells, and defend against P. acnes.

In one study done in 1953, acne sufferers got more acne and worse inflammation days after an interview in which anger was intentionally provoked.69 School examinations and stressful, high-visibility jobs have also been shown to worsen acne.70 However, doctors still prescribe dangerous acne medicines first, when instead teaching stress-coping methods to their patients might be a safer and more effective option. (Unfortunately, reducing stress is more complicated than simply taking a pill, and far less profitable. So you’re going to have to be your own “stress doctor” here, unless you feel like seeing someone about it. I went to a psychotherapist a few years ago for an eating disorder, and initially I was very hesitant to do it, as I didn’t want to be seen as “crazy” or “messed up,” but then I realized that everyone gets in a weird state of mind sometimes. Everyone could use a little help from time to time, and seeing a psychotherapist does not mean you’re crazy. Even though society would seem to say otherwise, it’s not any weirder than going to see a dermatologist.)

Now, in the grand scheme of things, stress itself is not a bad thing – in fact, the body’s stress response is extremely adaptive to dangerous encounters. A lion pounces on you, and your body launches into a fight or flight response; you see a loved one in grave danger, and you run to the rescue and lift a car off of her. The stress response is fantastically adaptive because it magnifies your senses, reflexes, physical strength, and speed temporarily, and then calms down to a relaxed state when the terrifying stimulus ends.

However, for many of us in this modern society, stress is our constant companion. It goes with us everywhere; we’re always worrying about how late we’re going to be for work, what grade we’re going to get on that history test, or how badly the stock market’s going to crash down on us and vaporize all our hard-earned savings. It’s this chronic stress that leads to



systemic inflammation and acne. Your body keeps pumping out stress hormones, which keep driving inflammation, and your body never truly relaxes.

Only when your body is in a relaxed state can it devote energy to repairing itself – expelling toxins, regrowing cells, healing wounds, fighting off foreign invaders. And healing acne.

For some acne sufferers, stress is the single most important cause of their acne, and reducing stress virtually eliminates their acne altogether. But for most people, stress is just another factor in the complex problem of acne. But it’s an important one. Stress deserves your attention, as do diet, sun, and everything else mentioned in this book.

You could fill a sizable library just with books on how to reduce stress, cultivate inner peace, relax, and live in the moment. The most powerful book I ever read on the topic is called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. If you haven’t read it, I strongly encourage you to try it. I know it looks like new-age fluff, but it’s not. It’s an incredibly powerful, insightful book about how to stop your mind from mulling over things you can’t control – in other words, it’s a chill pill for your brain. There are genuine biological reasons behind why this works to reduce stress. It did wonders for me, and I’m willing to bet it can do the same for you.

It’s worth mentioning that by reducing stress in this way, you can not only transform your skin, but you can also transform your entire life. For me, reading The Power of Now started me on a journey from a confused, angry, perpetually stressed adolescent to a patient, compassionate, and relaxed adult. I have a much easier time letting things go now, and I experience more of that quiet inner peace on a day-to-day basis than I did in my first 20 years of life. The benefits have extended far beyond healing my acne, and for that I am eternally grateful.



Exercise

What’s another great way to reduce stress? Exercise! Everyone knows this, but most people go about it the wrong way. The “common wisdom” is that jogging for an hour on the treadmill relieves stress. In fact, the opposite is true. When you subject your body to low-grade exercise (jogging, running) for an extended period of time, you start to kick in the very same stress response that we just talked about. Long-distance runners age more quickly than sprinters, have higher cortisol levels, and less healthy muscle mass. That’s because sprinting exploits the evolutionary reasons for our stress response – you sprint away from the lion and live to see another day, and after your body relaxes again, it builds muscle, lung power, and vascular strength so you can get away even faster next time. If you are a distance runner, try switching up your exercise routine a few times per week by substituting in some sprints. Each session typically takes only 10-20 minutes, so you can forget the hours of painful endurance training. For more information on high-intensity interval training (HIIT), go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training

High-intensity interval training (e.g. sprinting) also dramatically improves insulin function,71 meaning your body responds to blood sugar fluctuations better, creating less of the hormones that cause acne. It also burns more fat than endurance training, and takes less time and effort.72,73

There’s another reason to do HIIT instead of endurance training: a 2011 study tested twelve elite lifelong endurance athletes with no apparent health problems, and were shocked to find heart scarring (myocardial fibrosis) in half of them. Similarly-aged men who hadn’t done endurance training their entire lives, as well as young athletes, had no heart scarring.74

So what are some good exercise options for reducing stress? Sprinting, weight lifting, and sprint rowing, along with their relaxing counterparts, yoga





and rock climbing. Walking and hiking are also fantastic options, as they don’t activate the stress response like jogging does, but still give you the stress-reducing benefits of intense exercise.

Other benefits of exercise include increased blood circulation and elimination of toxins – both of which powerfully support the healing of acne and promote clear skin.

Quit Using Skin & Hair Care Products

This might sound a bit radical, given today’s obsession with personal care products and anal-retentive levels of cleanliness, but stick with me here. If you regularly use shampoo, lotion, soap, facial cream, scrubs, deodorants, and makeup, consider weaning yourself off them, or looking very carefully for some alternatives. Personally, after years of experimentation and reading about others’ experiences, I have found that shampoo, soap, lotion, and deodorant are all unnecessary. Shampoo and soap strip your hair and skin of natural oils, so they become dry and brittle; to combat this, you use conditioners and lotion. Washing your armpits with soap every day upsets the delicate ecosystem of beneficial bacteria, leading to overgrowth of foul-smelling bacteria – hence creating the need for deodorant. This works in the same way that using antibiotics leads to bacterial overgrowth in the gut, upsetting the delicate gut flora and leading to a host of problems.

When I stopped using shampoo, soap, lotion, and deodorant, I found that with basically zero effort, my hair stayed soft and full, my skin soft and moist, and my armpits completely innocent – or even “smelling good”, according to the ladies – I can only suspect that quitting deodorant gives your natural pheromones a chance to express themselves. And no, I’m not talking about B.O. That’s a completely separate phenomenon.



Once you start using one of these personal-cleaning products, it creates the need for others, until you find yourself putting twelve different lotions and creams and things on your body every single day. You create a whole ecosystem of needs and interdependencies that feeds itself. If you forget to use a product just once, it upsets the whole balance and leaves you with oily skin, terrible B.O., and no end of other issues. However, if you let your body do its thing naturally, you will see an amazing amount of resilience and adaptability develop. Don’t take a shower for a few days? No problem. Your body adapts.

(I’m going to tell you my dirty little secret. People are shocked when I tell them this, because they never would have guessed. I take only two to three showers a month, and I never use soap or shampoo. The interaction goes something like this: “I take two to three showers per month.” “What? No way! But you don’t smell at all! And your hair looks great. What’s your secret? How do you do it?!” And they’re amazed to find out that there is no secret, other than the fact that I use ZERO personal care products, except for lip balm, to which I am hopelessly addicted.)

Your body might be different, or your desires different – for example, you might have long hair, which goes either limp or frizzy without proper conditioner – but I encourage you to experiment with phasing out these products. You probably don’t want to go cold-turkey, because you’ll be nasty and gross for at least a week, so it’s a better idea to gradually reduce your use of these products and avoid the negative withdrawal effects. For example, start out by using shampoo and conditioner only every other day, instead of every day, and after a week or two, go to every third day, etc. Eventually, your body’s natural mechanisms kick in and normalize, and take perfect care of your hair and skin naturally.

There are also real health reasons to be careful personal care products: recent studies have suggested a link between deodorants or antiperspirants and cancer.75 There is considerable debate around this, but the fact that aluminum salts are the main active ingredient in antiperspirants, and that



aluminum is known to cause DNA mutation and epigenetic damage, is extremely worrying. An increasing number of breast cancers are being found in the region of the breast nearest the armpit, paralleling the rise in antiperspirant use.76 In addition, parabens are well-known endocrine disruptors, meaning they disrupt your body’s critical hormone signaling systems, and cause cancer as well. Parabens are found in sunscreens and all kinds of personal care products. Avoid them at all costs.

If you absolutely need to keep using certain personal care products, or they’re just too much of a leap to give up, then search out natural, organic products free of harmful chemicals. There are lots out there – look for products with no synthetic detergents, no parabens, no artificial preservatives, no artificial colors, no artificial fragrances, no petroleum by-products, tar derivatives, or genetically modified ingredients, and you should be in the clear. Look for products that focus on organic plant oils, beeswax, and herbs for fragrance, and you’ll be treating your skin to natural health and beauty. And always, always, always look for the label “non-comedogenic” – that means it won’t clog your pores.

Clean Up Your Home and Office

The last and final key: to maximize your chances of radiant health and beautiful skin, live in a clean, pure environment. That means:

✓ Pure water

✓ Clean air

✓ No toxic chemicals or cleaning products

Cleaning up your living environment for optimal health is not as hard as it sounds, and can actually be quite fun. You might want to start filtering your water, for example – with a tap filter, Brita-type pitcher filter, or a whole-



house filter; after you do so, you’ll notice that your water tastes a whole lot better without all the chlorine, chloramines, and other chemicals added to most municipal water supplies. In addition, you might try installing a shower filter; I did this myself, and instantly noticed that my skin felt softer and less irritated after taking showers.

Furthermore, you might try getting an air filter for the main rooms in your house. The range of toxic chemicals, carcinogenic fibers, allergens, and other pollutants floating around in the average household is really quite staggering. If you don’t live on a crowded, noisy street, try opening doors and windows on all sides of your house or apartment to get a good cross-breeze, which will totally clear out stale air and bring in fresh air in a matter of hours. If you do live on a noisy street, or other reasons prevent you from keeping your doors and windows open (the dead of winter, for example), try installing a HEPA-type air filter – not those ionic ozone-generators – and start enjoying clearer sinuses, increased energy, and improved disease resistance during cold and flu season.

Smoking

The idea that smoking worsens acne is not new, but it bears repeating here. Smoking increases sebum production, and we’ve already seen how that causes acne and inflammation. Smoking also increases sebum lipid peroxidation, the formation of the extremely dangerous cell- and DNA-damaging zombie fats we learned about in Chapter 5. Finally, smoking significantly lowers skin levels of vitamin E, one of your skin’s most powerful natural defense mechanisms, leaving your skin open to infection by P. acnes and damage by free radicals.77

If you do smoke, and you have tried to quit in the past but failed, read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.78



12

Final Words

All these things will help energize you for the seemingly Herculean task ahead of you: curing your acne, once and for all. Step by step, knock off the big offenders; start with the dairy, the sugar, the vegetable oils and the gluten. Then go down the list, hitting all the important keys that I’ve outlined, knowing that you’ll not only be working toward clear and acne-free skin, but toward the radiant health that is one of the most valuable things you will ever have.

Once you have achieved that beautiful clear skin, you might feel like experimenting again with some of the foods you’ve removed from your diet; by all means, do so! You’ll gain a deeper intuition about which foods set off your acne the most, because we are all unique, and all respond differently to the the same things. After some experimentation, though, you might find that by sticking mostly to the guidelines presented here, you feel the best you ever have, and you don’t feel like going back again. You have my blessing!

THE END

(Or the beginning?)

P.S. If you have any questions, comments, or need clarification on something, please shoot me an email at this address:

[email protected]





Remember, I’m here to help. I know how much acne sucks, and I want to do everything I can to help you get rid of yours as fast as humanly possible so your true inner beauty shines through.

Sincerely,Devin Mooers



Appendix

Glycemic Index and Insulin Index79

Food Food Type Glycemic Index

Insulin Index

All-Bran Breakfast Cereal 40 ± 7 32 ± 4Porridge Breakfast Cereal 60 ± 12 40 ± 4Muesli Breakfast Cereal 43 ± 7 46 ± 5Special K Breakfast Cereal 70 ± 9 66 ± 5Honeysmacks Breakfast Cereal 60 ± 7 67 ± 6Sustain Breakfast Cereal 66 ± 6 71 ± 6Cornflakes Breakfast Cereal 76 ± 11 75 ± 8Average: Breakfast Cereal 59 ± 3 57 ± 3White bread (baseline)

Carbohydrate-rich 100 ± 0 100 ± 0

White pasta Carbohydrate-rich 46 ± 10 40 ± 5Brown pasta Carbohydrate-rich 68 ± 10 40 ± 5Grain bread Carbohydrate-rich 60 ± 12 56 ± 6Brown rice Carbohydrate-rich 104 ± 18 62 ± 11French fries Carbohydrate-rich 71 ± 16 74 ± 12White rice Carbohydrate-rich 110 ± 15 79 ± 12Whole-meal bread

Carbohydrate-rich 97 ± 17 96 ± 12

Potatoes Carbohydrate-rich 141 ± 35 121 ± 11Average: Carbohydrate-rich 88 ± 6 74 ± 8Eggs Protein-rich 42 ± 16 31 ± 6Cheese Protein-rich 55 ± 18 45 ± 13Beef Protein-rich 21 ± 8 51 ± 16



Lentils Protein-rich 62 ± 22 58 ± 12Fish Protein-rich 28 ± 13 59 ± 18Baked beans Protein-rich 114 ± 18 120 ± 19Average: Protein-rich 54 ± 7 61 ± 7Apples Fruit 50 ± 6 59 ± 4Oranges Fruit 39 ± 7 60 ± 3Bananas Fruit 79 ± 10 81 ± 5Grapes Fruit 74 ± 9 82 ± 6Average: Fruit 61 ± 5 71 ± 3Peanuts Snack/confectionery 12 ± 4 20 ± 5Popcorn Snack/confectionery 62 ± 16 54 ± 9Potato chips Snack/confectionery 52 ± 9 61 ± 14Ice cream Snack/confectionery 70 ± 19 89 ± 13Yoghurt Snack/confectionery 62 ± 15 115 ± 13Mars Bars Snack/confectionery 79 ± 13 122 ± 15Jellybeans Snack/confectionery 118 ± 18 160 ± 16Average: Snack/confectionery 65 ± 6 89 ± 7Doughnuts Bakery product 63 ± 12 74 ± 9Croissants Bakery product 74 ± 9 79 ± 14Cake Bakery product 56 ± 14 82 ± 12Crackers Bakery product 118 ± 24 87 ± 12Cookies Bakery product 74 ± 11 92 ± 15Average: Bakery product 77 ± 7 83 ± 5



1 Bein, Barbara. “Nutrition education in US medical schools ‘precarious,’ say researchers.” American Academy of Family Physicians. http://www.aafp.org/online/en/home/publications/news/news-now/resident-student-focus/20101020nutritioneduc.html

2 Logan, Dr. Alan C. “Nutritional Medicine.” http://www.drlogan.com/nutritiionalmedicine.asp

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebaceous_gland

4 Bowe WP, Logan AC. Clinical implications of lipid peroxidation in acne vulgaris: old wine in new bottles. Lipids Health Dis. 2010 Dec 9;9:141.

5 The Association of Acne Vulgaris With Diet Veith WB, Silverberg NBCutis. 2011;88:84-91. http://www.cutis.com/PDF/088020084.pdf

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin

7 http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/

8 These words are from prolific user “alternativista” on the excellent forums at Acne.org. She has posted over 7,000 times at the time of this writing, and has some really insightful things to say about acne. http://www.acne.org/messageboard/index.php/user/54738-alternativista/

9 Smith R, Mann N, Mäkeläinen H, Roper J, Braue A, Varigos G. A pilot study to determine the short-term effects of a low glycemic load diet on hormonal markers of acne: a nonrandomized, parallel, controlled feeding trial. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2008 Jun;52(6):718-26.

10 Smith R, Mann N, Mäkeläinen H, Roper J, Braue A, Varigos G. A pilot study to determine the short-term effects of a low glycemic load diet on hormonal markers of acne: a nonrandomized, parallel, controlled feeding trial. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2008 Jun;52(6):718-26.

11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin

http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index



12 http://www.glycemicindex.com/

13 http://www.glycemicindex.com/

14 Ostman EM, Liljeberg Elmståhl HG, Björck IM. Inconsistency between glycemic and insulinemic responses to regular and fermented milk products. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Jul;74(1):96-100.

15 Holt SH, Miller JC, Petocz P. An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000-kJ portions of common foods. Am J Clin Nutr. 1997 Nov;66(5):1264-76.

16 Zouboulis CC, Eady A, Philpott M, Goldsmith LA, Orfanos C, Cunliffe WC, Rosenfield R.What is the pathogenesis of acne? Exp Dermatol. 2005 Feb;14(2):143-52.


18 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

19 Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, Hill K, Eaton SB, Brand-Miller J. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch Dermatol. 2002 Dec;138(12):1584-90. PubMed PMID: 12472346.

20 Ostman EM, Liljeberg Elmståhl HG, Björck IM. Inconsistency between glycemic and insulinemic responses to regular and fermented milk products. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Jul;74(1):96-100.

21 Melnik BC. Role of FGFR2-signaling in the pathogenesis of acne. Dermatoendocrinol. 2009 May;1(3):141-56.

22 Hoyt G, Hickey MS, Cordain L. Dissociation of the glycaemic and insulinaemic responses to whole and skimmed milk. Br J Nutr. 2005 Feb;93(2):175-7.

23 www.realmilk.com for raw dairy information, www.realmilk.com/where for locating raw milk

http://www.glycemicindex.com/


















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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics















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http://www.realmilk.com

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http://www.realmilk.com/where



24 Woodford, Keith. Devil in the Milk. Chelsea Green: Vermont, 2009. This is an excellent book on the little-known distinction between A1 and A2 milk. To illustrate how important the difference is, New Zealand is currently in the process of converting all their dairy herds to A2-producing cows, while they have been heretofore dominated by A1 cows.

25 This is done for aesthetic reasons, but I happen to think that cream-top milk and yogurt are the most delicious kinds out there. They seem more “real” to me, more genuine, than homogenized versions.

26 Lenoir M, Serre F, Cantin L, Ahmed SH. Intense sweetness surpasses cocaine reward.PLoS One. 2007 Aug 1;2(8):e698.

27 Shanahan MD, Catherine (2011). Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (Kindle Locations 2858-2859). Big Box Books. Kindle Edition.

28 Shanahan MD, Catherine (2011). Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (Kindle Locations 2869-2870). Big Box Books. Kindle Edition.


30 Fife ND, Bruce. Saturated Fat May Save Your Life. Healthwise Publications, 1999. 114.

31 Kromhout D, Geleijnse JM, Menotti A, Jacobs DR Jr. The confusion about dietary fatty acids recommendations for CHD prevention. Br J Nutr. 2011 Sep;106(5):627-32.

32 Siri-Tarino PW, Sun Q, Hu FB, Krauss RM. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease. Am J Clin Nutr. 2010 Mar;91(3):535-46. Epub 2010 Jan 13.

33 For more on this subject, dubbed the “lipid hypothesis,” as well as debunking myths about cholesterol and saturated fat, look into Gary Taubes’ excellent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.



















34 Kuipers RS, de Graaf DJ, Luxwolda MF, Muskiet MH, Dijck-Brouwer DA, Muskiet FA.Saturated fat, carbohydrates and cardiovascular disease. Neth J Med. 2011 Sep;69(9):372-8.

35 http://thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/vegoil.html

36 http://www.thresholdthree.com/as/deficiency.html

37 The China Study is not good science. These articles point out serious flaws:http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-8e.shtmlhttp://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cancer/the-china-study-vs-the-china-study/http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.htmlhttp://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/07/31/one-year-later-the-china-study-revisited-and-re-bashed/

38 http://www.allaboutfasting.com/soaking-grains.htmlhttp://nourishedkitchen.com/soaking-grains-nuts-legumes/

39 http://sproutpeople.org/

40 http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary/

41 http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary/

42 Su KP. Mind-body interface: the role of n-3 fatty acids in psychoneuroimmunology, somatic presentation, and medical illness comorbidity of depression. Asia Pac J Clin Nutr. 2008;17 Suppl 1:151-7. Review.

43 Freeman MP. Omega-3 fatty acids in major depressive disorder. J Clin Psychiatry. 2009;70 Suppl 5:7-11. Review.

44 Conklin SM, Manuck SB, Yao JK, Flory JD, Hibbeln JR, Muldoon MF. High omega-6 and low omega-3 fatty acids are associated with depressive symptoms and neuroticism.Psychosom Med. 2007 Dec;69(9):932-4. Epub 2007 Nov 8.



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http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-8e.shtml

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cancer/the-china-study-vs-the-china-study/

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cancer/the-china-study-vs-the-china-study/

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/

http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/07/31/one-year-later-the-china-study-revisited-and-re-bashed/




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http://www.allaboutfasting.com/soaking-grains.html

http://nourishedkitchen.com/soaking-grains-nuts-legumes/

http://nourishedkitchen.com/soaking-grains-nuts-legumes/

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http://sproutpeople.org/

http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/summary/




















45 Safarinejad MR, Hosseini SY, Dadkhah F, Asgari MA. Relationship of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids with semen characteristics, and anti-oxidant status of seminal plasma: a comparison between fertile and infertile men. Clin Nutr. 2010 Feb;29(1):100-5. Epub 2009 Aug 8.

46 Fontani G, Corradeschi F, Felici A, Alfatti F, Migliorini S, Lodi L. Cognitive and physiological effects of Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation in healthy subjects. Eur J Clin Invest. 2005 Nov;35(11):691-9.

47 Couet C, Delarue J, Ritz P, Antoine JM, Lamisse F. Effect of dietary fish oil on body fat mass and basal fat oxidation in healthy adults. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 1997 Aug;21(8):637-43.

48 Chambrier C, Bastard JP, Rieusset J, Chevillotte E, Bonnefont-Rousselot D, Therond P, Hainque B, Riou JP, Laville M, Vidal H. Eicosapentaenoic acid induces mRNA expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma. Obes Res. 2002 Jun;10(6):518-25.

49 Shelton RC, Miller AH. Inflammation in depression: is adiposity a cause? Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2011;13(1):41-53.

50 Lu DY, Tsao YY, Leung YM, Su KP. Docosahexaenoic acid suppresses neuroinflammatory responses and induces heme oxygenase-1 expression in BV-2 microglia: implications of antidepressant effects for ω-3 fatty acids. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2010 Oct;35(11):2238-48. Epub 2010 Jul 28.

51 Saul, Andrew W. "Vitamin D: Deficiency, Diversity and Dosage." DoctorYourself.com - Health, Naturally! Accessed December 02, 2011. http://www.doctoryourself.com/dvitamin.htm.

52 Hambidge M. Human zinc deficiency. J Nutr. 2000 May;130(5S Suppl):1344S-9S. Review.

53 Caulfield L, Black, RE. Zinc deficiency. In: Ezzati M, Lopez AD, Rodgers A, Murray CJL, eds. Comparative quantification of health risks: global and regional burden of disease attributable to selected major risk factors. Vol 1. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2004:257–79. http://www.who.int/publications/cra/chapters/volume1/0257-0280.pdf





























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54 http://www.aminoz.com.au/importance-zinc-zinc-deficiency-a-375.html

55 http://www.aminoz.com.au/importance-zinc-zinc-deficiency-a-375.html

56 Truong-Tran AQ, Ho LH, Chai F, Zalewski PD. Cellular zinc fluxes and the regulation of apoptosis/gene-directed cell death. J Nutr. 2000 May;130(5S Suppl):1459S-66S. Review.

57 Nelson AM, Zhao W, Gilliland KL, Zaenglein AL, Liu W, Thiboutot DM. Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin mediates 13-cis retinoic acid-induced apoptosis of human sebaceous gland cells. J Clin Invest. 2008 Apr;118(4):1468-78.

58 http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/minerals/zinc/

59 http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/minerals/zinc/

60 Zhang H, Liao W, Chao W, Chen Q, Zeng H, Wu C, Wu S, Ho HI. Risk factors for sebaceous gland diseases and their relationship to gastrointestinal dysfunction in Han adolescents. J Dermatol. 2008 Sep;35(9):555-61.

61 Parodi A, Paolino S, Greco A, Drago F, Mansi C, Rebora A, Parodi A, Savarino V. Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth in rosacea: clinical effectiveness of its eradication. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 2008 Jul;6(7):759-64. Epub 2008 May 5.

62 Bures J, Cyrany J, Kohoutova D, Förstl M, Rejchrt S, Kvetina J, Vorisek V, Kopacova M.Small intestinal bacterial overgrowth syndrome. World J Gastroenterol. 2010 Jun 28;16(24):2978-90. Review.

63 Lutgendorff F, Akkermans LM, Söderholm JD. The role of microbiota and probiotics in stress-induced gastro-intestinal damage. Curr Mol Med. 2008 Jun;8(4):282-98. Review.

64 Lutgendorff F, Akkermans LM, Söderholm JD. The role of microbiota and probiotics in stress-induced gastro-intestinal damage. Curr Mol Med. 2008 Jun;8(4):282-98. Review.

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66 Wu TQ, Mei SQ, Zhang JX, Gong LF, Wu FJ, Wu WH, Li J, Lin M, Diao JX. Prevalence and risk factors of facial acne vulgaris among Chinese adolescents. Int J Adolesc Med Health. 2007 Oct-Dec;19(4):407-12.

67 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation

68 http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/111609p38.shtml

69 Lorenz TH, Graham DT, Wolf S. The relation of life stress and emotions to human sebum secretion and to the mechanism of acne vulgaris. J Lab Clin Med. 1953 Jan;41(1):11-28.

70 Chiu A, Chon SY, Kimball AB. The response of skin disease to stress: changes in the severity of acne vulgaris as affected by examination stress. Arch Dermatol. 2003 Jul;139(7):897-900.

71 Babraj JA, Vollaard NB, Keast C, Guppy FM, Cottrell G, Timmons JA. Extremely short duration high intensity interval training substantially improves insulin action in young healthy males. BMC Endocr Disord. 2009 Jan 28;9:3.

72 Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C. Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism. Metabolism. 1994 Jul;43(7):814-8.

73 Boutcher SH. High-intensity intermittent exercise and fat loss. J Obes. 2011;2011:868305. Epub 2010 Nov 24.

74 Wilson M, O'Hanlon R, Prasad S, Deighan A, Macmillan P, Oxborough D, Godfrey R, Smith G, Maceira A, Sharma S, George K, Whyte G. Diverse patterns of myocardial fibrosis in lifelong, veteran endurance athletes. J Appl Physiol. 2011 Jun;110(6):1622-6. Epub 2011 Feb 17.

75 Darbre PD. Aluminium, antiperspirants and breast cancer. J Inorg Biochem. 2005 Sep;99(9):1912-9.





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76 Darbre PD. Underarm antiperspirants/deodorants and breast cancer. Breast Cancer Res. 2009;11 Suppl 3:S5. Epub 2009 Dec 18.

77 Capitanio B, Sinagra JL, Ottaviani M, Bordignon V, Amantea A, Picardo M. Acne and smoking. Dermatoendocrinol. 2009 May;1(3):129-35.

78 http://www.amazon.com/Allen-Carrs-Easyway-Stop-Smoking/dp/0615482155/

79 Holt SH, Miller JC, Petocz P. An insulin index of foods: the insulin demand generated by 1000-kJ portions of common foods. Am J Clin Nutr. 1997 Nov;66(5):1264-76.





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