1. When I was a kid, just getting a tan cleared up my acne.<p>2. Changing my diet helped clean up my acne (not eating junk food)<p>3. When I was a teenager, I got hurt really bad, and my father found me and had to take me to the hospital. I saw massive acne breakout on his face in less than 15 minutes.<p>4. When I got older and was less stressed about life, my acne went away. When I got a family/career/house and life stress was severe, acne would come back.<p>I think there a huge health and stress connection to acne.
I grew up with cystic acne that persisted into my early 20s, until two courses of Accutane cleared it up.<p>Anecdotally, I tried everything before going on accutane. I cut out sugar to the point of avoiding fruits with high glycemic indexes. I cut out dairy. I cut out meat. I tried every supplement you can imagine. If you're thinking about asking "but did you try X", don't bother, I did.<p>Only accutane worked.<p>Reading studies such as this, as well as the internet discussion regarding acne is a bit frustrating. Yes, there are anecdotes of this and that diet and lifestyle change reducing acne, but there's very little clinical evidence that non medical treatment improves cases of cystic acne, and yes, many diet studies have been performed.<p>Even this study grossly overstates their conclusions. Studying two primitive societies is not nearly enough data to support the conclusion in the title of this article.
Totally anecdotal, but I started taking vitamin D supplements at the suggestion of my doctor because of my family history of colon cancer. I noticed that my acne declined significantly. I'm wondering if it has to do with the amount of time one spends outside in the sun.
I'm always amused/horrified by Hacker News comments on anything health-related. Herein lie a group of incredibly smart individuals sharing anecdotal evidence and folk remedies without a lick of irony.
The HN title should probably say "nonwesternized" (the term used in the abstract) rather than "non-Western" (although the paper subtitle does use "Western"). Still an ambiguous term, but "non-Western population" would usually be understood to include countries like Japan and China, who this study definitely doesn't mean to include.
Why's everybody talking about vitamin D? (Same thing popped up in a Twitter thread I saw about this yesterday.)<p>As far as I can tell the paper only talks about high insulin loads and refined sugars for etiology? Then again I might have missed something? Seriously, I'm in no way competent to read these papers but all I could see were mentions of insulin spikes and such. Could someone ELI5 what I'm missing?
I noticed that on myself, high concentrations of sugar or high density carbs (pasta and bread) make it surge.<p>A couple of friends of mine also cured a candida infection by avoiding carbs. So our diet might play a role.
"As in the Kitava sample, skin infections and intramuscular abscesses were common and responded well to treatment with antibiotics such as erythromycin and tetracycline."<p>I'll take the occasional zit and cover it up with concealer, thank you very much.
taking a course of antidepressants and making some lifestyle changes during university for depression had the side effect of almost completely clearing up my acne that normal dermatological treatments were unable to deal with. given that there's some kind of biological link between chronic inflammation and depression, i wouldn't be surprised if some acne cases manifested the same way
Hyperinsulinemia caused by a high-carb diet seems to result in many of our health issues:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiVFtRlObZk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiVFtRlObZk</a>
The double negatives here make this heading really hard to parse (I actually read the abstract thinking something totally different and had to come back to check), maybe something along the lines of<p>"Acne vulgaris exists predominately in Western populations" or "Acne vulgaris mostly exists in Western Populations" would make it clearer.
TL; DR A 2002 study believes we should explore “dietary interventions using low–glycemic load carbohydrates may have therapeutic potential in the treatment of acne because of the beneficial endocrine effects of these diets.”
Given that all humans share a remarkably high % of genome, and race is a social construct, I'm struggling with the 'this is not genetic' part. Either its a truism, or its backed by strong evidence of no genetic linkage. Because this 'its not your race' thing, applies to almost anything. For instance the supposed Asian intolerance to unmodified milk proteins which has been changing as diet shifts. Is that also now not actually genetically determined?
There's a strong link between acne and consumption of dairy products.<p><a href="https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting-effects-of-milk/" rel="nofollow">https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-acne-promoting-effects-...</a><p><a href="https://nutritionfacts.org/video/saving-lives-by-treating-acne-with-diet/" rel="nofollow">https://nutritionfacts.org/video/saving-lives-by-treating-ac...</a>
As per my personal anecdotal evidence: diet is always key to Acne. I have been suffering from Acne vulgaris, Acne conglobata, and—worst of all—Acne inversa for all my life (26yo), and whenever I fell into bad eating habits with lots of (saturated) fats and carbohydrates, my skin issues are worsening. Western food is just poor quality in general, being heavily processed and “enhanced” and all.
They decided to choose a closed, often tribal cultures for comparison. We can assume they behave as most of us do, mate within the group mostly. So the genes pool/variation differences must be huge between them and Western population (whatever Western means in this context - let's say United States.) On what premises they excluded genetic factor, then?
I'v read a few studies about demodex mites causing chalazion[1]. Demodex mites are something humans picked up from having dogs and cats as pets. Do non-western countries have these animals as pets?<p>[1] ]<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26408604" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26408604</a>
For my wife, it's lots of sugar that causes outbreaks. Or worse, cheap American chocolate (British chocolate doesn't trigger it as bad).<p>But all the dermatologists she saw as a teen and young adult... always ridiculed this and insisted it had nothing to do with diet.
Only tangentially related, but recently I watched a documentary about the epidemic spread of myopia. Apparently the main culprit was the lack of time spent outside, which was interpreted as a lack of exposure to sunlight.<p>I wonder if acne can't have the same cause.
I mean you don’t need to be Sherlock to know sugar is bad for you, I’ve heard over and over again from all sorts of different publications and talks on the effects. You talk sugar out, you give yourself a better chance
Given the link between diet and the microbiome, and the possible link between diet and acne, I wonder if the microbiome has something to do with it.<p>Really, I'd be very surprised if the microbiome wasn't involved somehow.
I know this is anecdotal, but I lived in Beijing for 8 years, and it was VERY existent amongst the population there. Perhaps it's a function of the "western" cosmopolitan lifestyle of urbanites.
This title "Acne vulgaris is virtually nonexistent in non-Western populations" is not supported by the article.<p>HN policy is not to change the title which is "Acne Vulgaris - A Disease of Western Civilization"
i recently went on a little exploratory mission to see what the working explanation is for how the pores actually get blocked, and then swell. it sounds like the process, in super detail, is not well understood. from what i could gather, sebaceous glands get blocked, and the sebum they secrete starts to pool in the duct around the follicle, under the skin. the sebum creates an ideal environment for a bacteria called p acnes to flourish, which causes inflammation and redness. it seems that the rate of sebum production, and the composition of the sebum itself might have some effect on how likely the pore is to clog. and, of course, skin cleanliness is but one of many factors that seem to affect how often people get acne. as other people have noted, it sounds like "inflammation", a topic i know nothing about, seems to be at the root- basic idea seems to be that diet can cause inflammation which can then result in acne. im more curious about the actual point at which the pore becomes blocked, and why it happens, from a more mechanical way. i feel like a satisfactory answer to this question would address why some pores on someones face get clogged and others do not. im curious if anyone ever did a very detailed microscopic timelapse somehow. since i havent studied this field at all, its likely im not really asking the right questions, but if anyone reading this has anything interesting about this topic, id love to hear it.
I haven't read the paper but do they define what they mean by "westernized"? China is very much the east, does acne vulgaris have the same prevelance in countries in Asia and the middle east?
Acne vulgaris is the same as the one adolscents get, right?<p>How is the claim possibly true? Do they mean something other than what "non-Westerners" means literally? It happens e.g. in the middle-east too and I don't imagine that's an exception. I thought it was a pretty common human phenomenon.