138 replies to this topic

[Alika]

Well I hardly eat any sugar at all, and my skin has been relatively poor for quite sometime. The only sugar I get is from the 2 or 3 fruits I eat a day. But maybe I should just deny myself that as well? Might as well become an acetic monk.

[oldschool]

Hi guys,

Interesting the thread is moving outwards from zinc to different things. I've been taking zinc, A, 4000IU D, B100 among other things (chromium (600úg), E1000, selenium...). Im still getting some new stuff, but the QUALITY of my skin is so much better. it seems much more healthy, and seems to regenerate a lot quicker than it was. it's not as fericious as it once was. im still looking for the extra ingredient though.

when i was on a high dose of most of my bag, i was a lot clearer. im going to try the B complex next in a higher dose.

Ive been reading up on vitamin D, and am pretty sure it is a major factor with acne. it just makes too much sense! of course, it will take me a time to build up vitamin D which may prove to help a lot more than i am experiencing now.

For those that are interested, here are 2 interesting articles I've found on D:

http://www.truthpublishing.com/healingsunl...df-cat21258.htm

http://www.healthbooksummaries.com/VitaminDCure.html

Keep up the good work guys,

OldSchool

[databased]

maybe I should just deny myself that as well?

If the idea that zinc metabolism is the key to acne were right, then it's total glycemic load that is relevant in the long haul. More specifically, it's making sure you avoid stimulating insulin resistance, because that is the starting stage of what ends up as diabetes, and diabetes absolutely, positively causes you to literally piss away your zinc.

Note that this does not mean that sugar directly causes acne (which is reassuring, since we all see people having that extra slice of cake and never having a breakout). This hypothesis says some people will be able to eat lots of sugar and, because they aren't developing insulin resistance, they don't piss away their zinc and they don't get acne.

The core idea is just zinc, zinc, zinc, and the fact that insulin resistance can lead to zinc deficiency is just one of the aspects.

Too many people imagine that food goes directly to their body's cells and imagine direct relationships that just don't exist. You drink a Coke? Sure, that'll be used as sugar. You eat an apple? Sorry, that gets turned into sugar too. How about some spinach that is so disgusting it must be healthy? Yep, sugar, sugar, sugar.

Cordain's theory of relating total glycemic load to acne is about insulin response. So it's not directly about sugar, but about how fast the food you eat turns into sugar, and the effect that has in the long run on your insulin sensitivity. Eat that potato baked instead of mashed, it won't turn into sugar so fast and stimulate insulin so much. Likewise, choose black beans instead of pinto. Not everything is so intuitive. Hey look, the total glycemic load of a large slice of white bread is higher than just eating 2 teaspoons of table sugar! Amongst fruits, there is also significant variance in total glycemic load. Coke is still Bad. But juicing is pretty bad too -- you're basically extracting all the sugar and leaving behind all the stuff that slowed down how fast that food would have been turned into sugar in your body. How about a healthy bag of dried fruit? Well, what did drying do? It got rid of some stuff, but sugar sure doesn't evaporate, so you're left with a denser dose of sugar in effect.

Again, it's about the indirect effect over time on your insulin system. So, if you are blessed, either via genetics or by having rarely eaten a typical high glycemic load Western diet, you can surely go to McDonald's today, drink that large Coke, and not get acne. Your system will take the hit like a champ, not really piss away significantly more zinc, and you'll go on your way. Do that every day for years and, if you're not genetically blessed, your insulin system will start to change, you'll be pissing away more zinc, and you may see acne as a result. On the day you stop drinking those Cokes, will your acne disappear? No, it took a long time to develop insulin resistance, and it can take a while to get rid of it.

Does eating your beloved fruit affect your acne? The zinc hypothesis says: if you do not test for the slightest evidence of insulin resistance, then probably not. And besides, a modest amount of insulin resistance is just one of many factors that could be giving you an impaired zinc status that leads to acne.

I'm highly skeptical of that path that leads to food obsession on a daily basis. Like trained pigeons who go nuts because the experimenter starts giving rewards at random, it's too easy to start seeing imaginary associations between inputs and outputs. The case for improving your acne at least somewhat in the long run by lowering your total glycemic load is good; the case for this piece of pie caused that zit is not very good at all.

Interesting the thread is moving outwards from zinc to different things.

Not me -- I'm totally focused on zinc. Why am I interested in Vitamin D? Because of the study that showed that ordinary zinc supplementation could not raise zinc serum levels in Alzheimer's patients until they added in Vitamin D. Prior to that, I did not see a good reason why Vitamin D should help my acne at all (and since I've taken a fair amount of Vitamin D for years, I know it did not, in fact, by itself help my acne).

There are 10,000 things that could affect acne, and that someone somewhere strongly believes do affect acne. I'm trying to to get to some coherent theory of acne that helps me understand existing facts and why it's so hard to cure. Cordain has theory of acne. Its centerpiece is total glycemic load and, by the way, you might want to take zinc. My idea is that he's got the priorities wrong. It's all about zinc, and that explains both why total glycemic load matters and why it won't be a miracle cure for everyone.

[Alika]

I see. Perhaps I need to curb my brown rice eating then. Could you show me some websites with good lists of low-insulin foods?

I was also wondering if any of you guys have ever done liver flushes or coffee enemas? I'm really in a bad way right now

[Prekktonn]

I have always had crazy acne from since I could remember. However mine is the kind that seems to just disappear from time to time. Some weeks i look perfect and others its horribly painful and people start to ask questions. Which is hands down the most frustrating thing because I am constantly thinking "what did I do?" or "what is it i ate to do this?" I can't even look at food without thinking that these days. And the worst part of it is I know I'm not eating certain foods I love because I, for some reason, have linked it to my acne. It's funny how one remembers times when they had clear perfect skin, and I can even remember small, very small periods where it was perfect. I remember where I was what I was doing/wearing. lol .. that's totally crazy. Aside from all this nonsense though and the reason why i'm posting here is because it seems that everytime i get clear its because im supplementing with something or getting allot of sun or drinking the right stuff. I'm avoiding all dairy right now. Although my girlfriend made me eat a boat load of ice cream on V day and im still getting over that. I'm pretty sure lots of bread does it as well as fries and chicken fingers ( dammit!!) Anyway when I feel great i'm always in the gym lifting/running. Some of the supplements I feel have helped me in the past are MuscleMilk, Vitamin C, lots of ibprofern, and for some odd reason the Airborne effervescent stuff. I don't know what is in this stuff that does it but maybe it will help your reaserch. Its so hard to figure out what helps because im constantly accidentally eating something that breaks me out and so im never able to figure it out. It just seems like everything i eat affects my skin in a negative way. I will even fast from time to time drinking nothing but water and my skin clears up .. well i cant fast forever and im already a lean enough guy as it is ( 6'0 175) When i lose weight or stop eating for a day or two people start calling me skinny .. lol that didn't take long. Sorry for the unorganized post here but its my first and im a little cramped for time. Thanks for all the reaserch you've been doing. I'm going to begin my own and see where it can lead me.

[databased]

for some odd reason the Airborne effervescent stuff. I don't know what is in this stuff that does it

8mg of zinc, for one thing. Some magnesium as well, which may also indirectly help with raising zinc serum levels.

Perhaps I need to curb my brown rice eating then.

In my useless opinion, if you're a brown rice and fruit eating kinda person, as opposed to a white bread and soft drink and lotsa ice cream and candy person, then that really drops the odds that insulin is a big factor in your acne. But, the easiest way to test that is to just go no/low carb for a while, if the thought is obsessing you. Sorry to hear you're having a bad time right now.

[Prekktonn]

That may be and of course like everything else .. Once the problem goes away I quit supplementing. It's hard to develop a "regimen" but I'm trying.

Databased .. How's your progress going so far after all the ice cream and your zinc + a + d only experiment

[Ha2ko]

databased - thank you so much for your consistent and wholehearted approach to the research.
I just read throgh the entire thread, took me some time, and was a great read

Im from scandinavia myself, so I particularly enjoyed the bit about D-vitamin, as it kinda makes perfect sense in my case (no sun the entire year, all-year-around naturally dark skin, 2 month intense sun exposure, acne CLEAR, only to return in september).

I must admit that my acne is light, atleast not above light/moderate (everything in perspective) but the correlation with sun exposure makes to much sense to be ignored.
Currently im doing cod liver oil and zinc, but only 25 mg since im a bit scared of going above the recomended dose. (im doing loads of other supplements too, so its hard to say whats working since ive actually stayed quite clear for a week now)

I'll definetley post back when I've done some more tests with Vit-D supplements, increased zinc and/or changing to the picolinate type.

Note: Im also on a non dairy, sugars, soda, white bread, processed food diet, taking B complex, chromium, E, C, and doing dans BP full time, so you might say im trying everything at once.

Once again: Thank you!

[databased]

How's your progress going so far after all the ice cream and your zinc + a + d only experiment

I'm still recovering from the last failure. To prove a particular non-megadose arrangement doesn't work, I have to let acne develop, then I have to take 5-10 days to get clear again. I'm so lucky that my acne is so reliably chronic that it always comes back promptly when I stop megadosing :-). I have lots of ideas to try, but it takes sooooo long to do one test. OTOH, the zinc hypothesis just gets more and more interesting, not because it promises an easy cure, but because it explains why a bunch of different things help a bunch of different people at least somewhat, but a really serious cure is elusive.

My priorities are changing, though. The relationship between melatonin and zinc is a serious one. Because artificial light is ubiquitous, it is very easy to have a messed-up melatonin cycle. Also, it's a harder to have a messed-up melatonin cycle in the acne-free primitive tribes that Cordain studied -- no artificial light pretty much means you will lay down and sleep when the sun goes down, and you won't be sleeping much after it comes up! And, of course, we all know that one of the "quack" cures for acne that someone periodically claims helped them is to "get more sleep", or some such sleep-related advice. If the nocturnal melatonin surge helps prevent acne, but only in the presence of sufficient zinc, that ties all those results up in a neat package.

I already sleep in a darkened bedroom, but I've been highly inconsistent about timing my sleep pattern, and I'm a night owl (went to bed at 3am last night), and that's no way to have a normal nocturnal melatonin cycle. No matter how well I try to black out the bedroom, when the sun comes up there will be leakage, and it doesn't take much (although there can be individual variation) light at all to start suppressing your melatonin. If melatonin+zinc is really important to treating acne, then I have to try to move to a sleep cycle that puts me in bed much earlier. Who here has not had one of those "overnight miracles" where they got up the next morning and suddenly the face looked a whole lot better than when they went to bed? Interestingly, going to bed earlier correlates statistically/geographically with less depression; the relationship between acne and depression may be a chemical one, not a psycho-social one.

Vis a vis melatonin/zinc/acne, I had no idea that night blindness was a possible side-effect of isotretinoin (Accutane). There is (possibly wild) speculation that isotretinoin may affect receptors in the retina needed for melatonin suppression. If the actual mechanism for isotretinoin were depending on its effect on melatonin, then that would neatly fold Accutane's (non-100%) success right back to the zinc hypothesis, since melatonin clearly makes use of zinc during the nocturnal surge. I wonder if long-term damage to retinal cells could be the mechanism by which Accutane continues to work after treatment stops. I can't find any evidence that anyone has looked to see if the melatonin cycle is different before/after using Accutane. Probably not; few researchers look at melatonin because it requires a sleep lab and a 24-hour commitment from the patient.

I am also very interested in the finding that acute exercise can temporarily boost serum zinc levels, since it's hard to find anything that does that. Who hasn't heard the claim that exercise helped someone's acne? But we know it's a totally inconsistent effect. In fact, when I had acne in high school, the basketball coach supplied a regular stream of wind sprints, and it sure didn't help my acne at all. And, in fact, exercise definitely increases how much zinc you excrete, so more exercise (to a certain degree) requires more zinc supplementation if you want to keep up. This is why I keep coming back to the zinc hypothesis. It helps explain why something works for one person, but not for another person (or maybe even not for the same person at a later time). Does exercise help or hurt? Maybe it requires both anaerobic exercise and zinc supplementation to put you into the "exercise helps" category. In any case, I've started a little ritual where I swallow the smallest-dose zinc pill I can find, wait a bit, then get on the treadmill and spend 30 minutes going anaerobic and then slowing and waiting for complete recovery as many times as I can. I always remember Covert Bailey's advice that the benefit of exercise is in the recovery period. Maybe the zinc is better after the exercise? Maybe the exercise is better near bedtime (unfortunately raising core body temp, making it harder to sleep)? OTOH, a longstanding pet theory of mine is that exercising on an empty stomach at about 6pm is an effective way to move tryptophan across the blood-brain barrier (tryptophan being the precursor to serotonin, which the pineal gland needs to make melatonin). Maybe exercise only works when its timed right, and works by its indirect effect on melatonin rather than any direct effect on zinc. Who knows. Too many things to test.

I'll probably think something different later (or maybe will have given up completely!), but if I had to place a bet on something working right now, I would say:

* get your Vitamin D levels above 50 (can take a few months;$60 test)
* don't use cod liver oil; eat a baby carrot or 3 for Vitamin A
* take your B-complex pill, with the B6 in it
* get some magnesium (may already be in your calcium pill)
* get a normal melatonin cycle (go to bed early, blacked-out bedroom, etc.)
* take at least one of your zinc pills right before bedtime
* try the zinc + anaerobic exercise thing
* I can't eat dairy

Does diet matter? Apart from the fact it sure looks like I have a problem with dairy, I'm just not convinced it matters that much if you're not someone who's developing some insulin resistance. Trying to not consume a large portion of your calories from sugary/starchy foods is probably a Good Thing for lots of other reasons, and maybe some percentage of folks are spiking enough insulin that it takes out enough zinc to affect their acne. But I'm just not yet buying the whole sugar-is-Satan scenario. The zinc hypothesis says that if a high-sugar diet matters to acne, it's only to the degree it's increasing the area-under-curve of your insulin serum levels, leading to more zinc being taken out. That, in turn, implies that any acne improvement from eating a less sugary diet would take days or weeks or months to appear, since insulin resistance doesn't go away immediately when you change your diet.

And, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that if insulin resistance were a powerful factor in acne, then pretty much every Type II diabetic would be a freak show of exploding acne. Acne is a symptom that can appear with diabetes, but AFAICT, it is not common enough to even make most people's top 5 list of symptoms.

Seems more likely to me that insulin is just one of the too-many things that can marginally affect your zinc status, turning into it into yet another thing that Works For Some People, and adding to the pile of things that help confuse people about what the root cause of acne might be.

Returning to the thought that maybe acne prevention needs melatonin+zinc, and my ideas about getting tryptophan in the brain to fuel the melatonin: if 'twere true, then the timing of your sugarfest could matter. Some believe fructose binds with tryptophan to keep it from getting to the brain, and serum tryptophan has a circadian rhythm that must precede the cascade into serotonin->melatonin. Hence, it could be that evening sugar fosters acne by killing the evening stream of tryptophan that needs to get into the brain to lead to melatonin later. That would be a non-insulin way for a sugary diet to influence acne almost overnight, which is what we all feel we see (sometimes).

I will double-down my bets by moving my exercise ritual to evening, and making sure it's on an empty stomach, as well as trying to restrict my sugar-binging (oh, lovely, lovely Coke!) to early afternoon or before.

OTOH, I might be just another ranting amateur medical crank, and you may just be wasting your time reading this :-).

[marjr81588]

wow thats awesome.....do uthink its safe to take with accutane?

[databased]

When you're taking a heavy-duty drug like Accutane, I would definitely work it out with your doctor the idea of taking any supplements. However, medical practice is not particularly rational, so if your doctor says to take absolutely no zinc with Accutane, I bet he wouldn't think twice about you eating zinc-rich foods like blueberries.

From the little I know, doing a zinc regimen the same time as taking Accutane would not mitigate any of the risks, but it might raise the odds that the Accutane will be more effective. But you have to work with your doctor, 'cause s/he will be the one trying to figure out how to help you if anything goes wrong.

[databased]

Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon Zinc: Copper

Copper and zinc compete with each other for absorption in the intestine. If you're trying to increase your zinc status, you don't want to be getting extra copper. In Wilson's disease, where a genetic defect keeps the body from getting rid of copper, patients may use zinc to try to block the absorption of copper.

The zinc hypothesis says that the core cause of much acne is a problem in zinc metabolism, so it predicts that things associated with increasing copper in the body may be associated with acne as well.

anti-acids I could've sworn my acne was better during a week when I was taking Zantac every day. You need sufficient stomach acid to digest copper. Anti-acids may decrease the amount of copper you're getting, making any zinc you're getting better absorbed, improving acne.

oral contraceptives Here, the data is chaotic. Oral contraceptives are associated with improved acne, though they don't work for everybody. Oral contraceptives increase copper absorption, which the zinc hypothesis predicts could make acne worse. But they also, obviously, affect estrogen, which in turn affects melatonin, which in turn may be the mechanism by which zinc improves acne. (And, of course, the ability of oral contraceptives to improve acne may simply lie in mechanisms outside the zinc hypothesis.) One possible explanation is that for most patients, the effect of the oral contraceptive (indirectly) on melatonin outweighs the potential impairment of zinc absorption. But suppose that when women go off oral contraceptives, the effect on melatonin dies out quickly, while the impaired zinc absorption does not die out so quickly. That would explain women who get a devastating increase in acne when going off the pill.

Or, ignoring melatonin, it may be that oral contraceptives increase tissue absorption of zinc, and that that improves acne on its own, despite causing a drop in serum levels of zinc. (This is an example why there is no definitive test for zinc deficiency; women on oral contraceptives have lowered serum zinc levels, but do not show any effects of being zinc deficient.) Again, going off oral contraceptives may be a case of the drug's positive effect on acne disappearing much faster than it's negative effects: perhaps tissue zinc absorption goes away quickly, while decreased serum levels of zinc lingers.

diet I've already argued against the idea of sugar being the Satan of acne via the route of total glycemic load. Sure, increasing insulin resistance should result in at least marginally greater zinc excretion, but that should be a trendline over time, and doesn't really explain the dreaded (and possibly imaginary) "food allergy", in which eating X gives me acne the next day. But copper content could help explain those "food allergy" ideas. Eat a food with too much copper and not enough zinc, and help drop your zinc status, possibly explaining a short-term "next-day acne" effect.

This is tricky, since most foods have some copper, and it's not clear whether the absolute amount of copper is at some point more important that the zinc/copper ratio in the food. Although you can look at a chart of copper-rich foods, the actual content can vary greatly. For example, some plantations in the world use copper as a fungicide -- so the amount of copper in food X may vary wildly depending on which specific farmer it came from.

Consider eating fruits. What could be more healthy? Yet I (and some others) swear that bananas make my acne worse, at least sometimes. Yes, it's true that bananas have twice the total glycemic load of, say, an apple. But I bet the real culprit is copper. Bananas have a relatively high copper/zinc ratio.

Cordain offers this lengthy theory about grains/beans/potatoes being poisons until they are cooked. In the case of acne, the zinc hypothesis is much simpler. Grains/beans/potatoes can be good sources of copper.

drinking water You may be getting some extra copper from your (copper or brass) pipes. Some people have experienced the effect that when they went to a new place with different water, their acne changed. The zinc hypothesis says you probably want to only use cold water from the tap to drink or cook, since hot water may have leached more copper from pipes. You may also want to avoid copper cookingware.

But this can also swing the other way! If your drinking water is coming from galvanized (zinc-coated) pipes, then you may be getting a significant dose of zinc from it. Thus, some people who experienced a mysterious change in their acne after moving to a new living location may actually be seeing the results of making a big change in their copper/zinc ratio.

What to do?
The beauty of the zinc hypothesis is that it says all kinds of different things can affect zinc, so all kinds of different things can affect acne -- and that certainly agrees with real-world observations. But what can you do about it? Well, don't get totally obsessed about copper: a certain amount is both required and unavoidable. You just want to keep it from impairing your zinc status. Here's some possibly rational ideas:

• Get your drinking water from a source known to not contain copper.
• Don't use copper cookware, or take supplements/vitamins that contain copper.
• Let the copper content of food at least mildly influence your diet. Surely we can all manage to avoid eating calf's liver :-).
• This is probably mostly a competition-in-the-intestine issue, in which case timing matters. Maybe you can eat those copper-rich foods (e.g. bananas) in the morning, far away from your just-before-bedtime zinc supplement pill.
• Try to take your zinc picolinate on an empty stomach. That greatly reduces the odds there is any copper around to interfere with its absorption. The oft-repeated myth that taking zinc on an empty stomach guarantees nausea is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you give patients a placebo and tell them it induces nausea, a good number of them will feel nauseous. If you can't take it on an empty stomach, try having it with a small amount of food -- but something that certainly does not contain copper.

[oldschool]

Interesting the thread is moving outwards from zinc to different things.

Not me -- I'm totally focused on zinc.

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound as though we were moving onto other things, I just meant we're widening the picture a little. It's interesting. I agree with you that zinc is a major factor. I'm convinced that my acne requires at least zinc and vitamin D - I must be deficient in both. I live in the middle of the UK, and when I go on holiday, I seem to get a lot clearer towards the end of the holiday before I come home!

I'm not suprised by the findings in the studies on alzheimer's patients connecting vit D with zinc. Whether or not it is a major factor for zinc absorption or motility; I'm sure vitamin D is important for acne just as zinc is. It just makes too much sense to be ignored. As you said you didn't associate vitamin D with helping, but had been supplementing for a long time. It's certainly got to be a factor with me. I'm not 100% clear yet, just moved upto 10,000IU/day. Going to see how I get on, feels like a bit of a waiting game.


Oldschool

[midtudorcrisis]

Interesting post Oldschool. I am also UK based and every time I go abroad experience the same improvement you describe. I had always thought it was due to the UV light killing the P. Acnes bacteria, but it may be that the imrovement is actually due to the effect of sunlight on Vitamin D synthesis.

You've come up with some very thought-provoking theories, databased. Hope that they continue to work in practice for you!

midtudorcrisis

[Ha2ko]

Sorry, this is a bit off-topic, but u guys living in the uk.. where do you get your d-vit supplements from?

[databased]

Zinc and Prostate Cancer

One of the bugaboos about taking zinc is studies implying that zinc supplementation might actually raise your risk for getting the worst kind of prostate cancer. Pretty scary. However, like most supplement studies, these are largely poorly done. Moreover, some prostate cancer researchers found these results weird, dare I say, unbelievable.

Like acne, prostate cancer appears to have some relationship with male hormones. We know that zinc may help acne (and prostate enlargement) via its effect on the cascade of male hormones. So, it's a real head scratcher that zinc would show any indication of causing prostate cancer, let alone the most virulent kinds.

But today's news offers a different explanation. Finasteride (aka Propecia, a baldness cure) was designed to interfere with the cascade of male hormones, possibly in much the same way zinc does. Like zinc, people thought it ought to reduce prostate cancer. But like zinc (although in a more expensive and better study), a study showed that finasteride actually raised your risk of getting the worst kind of prostate cancer! Omigod (as teenaged-girl prostate researchers are wont to say).

The wrinkle came after looking closer at the actual tissue from men in the study who (ouch!) had their prostate removed. If they think you have prostate cancer, they're gonna wanna (ouch!) take a tissue sample of your prostate (hopefully hitting the cancerous part!) and look at it under a microscope to see if it looks like an aggressive cancer or not. Of course, that was kind of a random sample, so it could be wrong. Maybe your needle biopsy picked up a part of the prostate that really didn't look that bad... yet. But if the man elects to go ahead and (ouch!) have their prostate removed, then the pathologist has the freedom to just cut the damn thing up any which way and see much more accurately if you had Bad Prostate Cancer or Eh? Prostate Cancer.

The surprise is this: significantly fewer of the patients who were getting finasteride actually had been incorrectly misclassified by their biopsy. This could only come to light after the percentage (25%) of men who elected surgery completed that and had their prostate tissue examined. One way to look at this is that finasteride shrunk the prostate down, so if you're drilling for "Bad Cancer", you're more likely to find some in the shrunken target, making you think the gland has significantly more areas of aggressive cancer than it really does. Before realizing the misclassification rates were different for people on finasteride, the analysis said that the drug was actually more likely to give you Bad Prostate Cancer.

Today's big study pretty much makes it conclusive that you could prevent a significant amount of prostate cancer with finasteride.

My punch line, of course, is that you have to wonder if this is not exactly the same situation with zinc. Like finasteride, zinc was expected to help prevent prostate cancer. Like finasteride, the surprising result was that zinc seemed to make it more likely you would get Bad Prostate Cancer. However, unlike finasteride, nobody has put the kind of money into looking to see if that surprising result was actually a mistake. There's just never much research dollars for looking at a cheap supplement that anybody can buy.

Why would prostate cancer be on the rise? Well, it's probably not as much on the rise as many people imagine. The longer you live, the better the odds you'll get cancer -- that's just the nature of cancer. Since we live longer these days, you're going to see more people dying of cancer -- because they failed to die of a heart attack or stroke much younger!

But it also is interesting that with modern farming techniques, zinc just gets farmed out of the soil. Do farmers put back as much zinc manually as used to be there in the soil? Nobody knows. Could a gradual depletion of zinc out of the soil account for an increase, over decades, in both prostate cancer and acne? I wonder.

[Alika]

So I definitely don't think the zinc pincolinate is helping at all. I"m thinking of switching to a different zinc because this zinc deficiency thing just seems so logical. Is there a significant difference between these types of zinc? What if I try optizinc or chilted? Or maybe I should just abandon zinc altogether and start from scratch. I'm fucking crawling out of my skin

[databased]

So I definitely don't think the zinc pincolinate is helping at all.

Just as it's clear that zinc is a co-factor in acne for many people, it's also clear it cannot be the only factor, since it's no magic cure for everybody. For example, if you're Vitamin D deficient, that may (IMHO) reduce the odds of zinc helping you. You could try a different brand in the hopes that the bottle you got was just no good, but I'm not sure that's very likely.

I would back off any large dose of zinc and take something modest, like 30mg just before bed, taken with whatever pill you take that has Vitamin B6 in it, on an empty stomach, if possible.

* Roughly what is the current state of your acne? How often is there brand new acne? Do you (or your dermatologist) figure this is mild, moderate, or severe acne?

* What-all do you currently do to your skin topically?

* What's your sleep cycle like? How much light is in your bedroom when you sleep? What time do you go to bed, what time do you get up, how do you feel when you wake up?

* What's a typical day's diet like (food/drink)?

* Alcohol use?

* Copper may compete with zinc for absorption; is there a lot of copper in your diet?
table at bottom
This may not be that relevant if you were taking a megadose of zinc on an empty
stomach and not getting any improvement. If you take zinc several hours away from
any food, zinc should win :-).

* What exactly do you take in the way of pills/supplements?

* Can't remember if you eat dairy; if so, have you tested going off dairy?

* Are you on any drugs or medications?

* Any existing health problems besides acne?

* What's your exercise schedule like?

* Where does the water you drink come from? Any water softener system involved?

* Anything else you're doing right now from the land of strange and bizarre acne cures? :-)

[Camotree]

Thanks for this good info Databased

Im excited now. I stumbled upon this group when looking for mega dosing zinc. I do not have acne, but do have psoriasis.

Your info makes me think that mega dosing zinc may help my psoriasis, Im going to try it. Something I read said that psoriasis sufferers typically are zinc defficient AND have copper levels too high. You said Zinc Picolinate helps to reduce copper levels, perfect!

Got my zinc now, cant wait to get started

I bought mine here, seems cheap, about $8 for 120 50mg gel caps.

http://www.iherb.com/m/dd?pid=878

If someone else is going to order from the same place they can use this coupon code to save 5 bucks, KIC061