The research into acne has heated up in recent years. In their thoroughness, scientists are going back to revisit theories that have existed as basic received wisdom for years now and have informed our understanding into what causes acne. The acne causes that scientists have understood so far have decidedly not included sugar as a possibility; fat, perhaps, but not sugar. Actually, that basic understanding is not altogether flawed. They still don't think that sugar itself causes acne. It is just that sugar happens to belong to a group of foods that raise your blood glucose levels very quickly (they like to call this tendency, a high glycemic index), and make you put out a lot of insulin and other hormones into your bloodstream, and in general distress the body so much that it can secrete a little extra oil on the skin.
It couldn't have been easy for them to revisit accepted wisdom into acne causes from a long time ago. Doing that just changes everything. But they tested this theory on a few dozen male subjects, all of them with quite a case of acne. For three months, they gave a few lucky participants a normal unhealthy diet with white bread, lots of sugar-loaded cereals, and pasta, and to the others, they gave a much healthier (and consequently less desirable) low glycemic diet of whole grain bread, lean meats, fruit, and high protein, low sugar shakes. And they discovered that the acne skin lesions visibly went away in the ones with the healthier low glycemic diet, but the control group that was given the high glycemic food saw no difference in their acne problems. They also found that the people on the healthy diet had lower levels of male hormones circulating through their system. Free unattached male hormones are always known to feature among the leading acne causes.
Would you like then to give up sugary sodas and cereals for clearer pain-free skin? Who knows, you could react just like one of those test subjects they had. But it depends, of course. It depends on whether you're male. Well, here is another piece of insight they've come up with in their search for acne causes. Certainly, having a great breakout all over your face can be really stressful. But what if the stress itself were to come back and reinforce the acne that caused it in the first place?
Now, why would this be? Well, there's been a study that not only makes the relationship between stress and acne look possible, they even have a way of explaining it. Basically, they took up about 100 high school students with moderate levels of acne, for a few months. They saw that any pop quizzes right away sent their anxiety levels shooting, and the anxiety inflamed cells in their body just a little bit and caused a real breakout of acne. If you think about it, you wouldn't really need it perfectly well proven how much stress or a sugary diet contribute to acne, would you? These factors seem to basically affect everything about our health. Until they use this information to invent a drug for acne, perhaps we could all just keep away from all that is basically a regular modern lifestyle.
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