sepsi

And this forum is filled with people for whom it didn't work. And with people who chose not to use medicines that cause harm.

 

This forum is also filled with people who haven't made much progress with their acne in years. So not much of an argument.

The only things inconclusive about the diet studies are some usually unimportant detail about what exactly in whatever diet studied provided the benefit. So they want to pinpoint something that can't be pinpointed. The body is a system with billions of processes going on. Everyone's body does slightly different things with the nutrients it receives and about the crap that is done to it. And different aspects of the diet can have a greater impact one one person than it does on another. And there are so many nutrient deficiencies and events that end up producing the symptom of acne.

What is crystal clear to me is that diet affects everything going on in your body and if you want it to function right and be disease free, you have to eat right.

And it's absolutely ridiculous to think diet does not affect acne. It's not possible for it not to.

 

 

Many things are anti inflammatory. So why apply something that causes harm?

BP never reduced my acne. And it increases redness and irritation. The forum is filled with people that say the same.

 

There's little evidence that BP, when used properly, causes any harm. And just like every other medicine out there, BP has both positive and negative effects. The art of medicine comes in choosing medicines that do more good than harm.

 

If BP reduced your acne, then you are among the minority. The other sections of this forum are filled with people who say that BP indeed has reduced their acne and skin redness. Not to mention tens and tens of clinical studies that show efficacy from BP.

 

Why use BP? Because at the moment it's one of the best anti-acne topicals. No 'natural ingredient' has similar demonstrated efficacy. Some antioxidants, like niacin and vitamin C derivates, show promise and might even turn out to be more effective than BP. That's for the future science to show. But it doesn't take away the fact that BP does work.

Also, because oxidized lipids in the skin are considered a culprit in acne formation and benzoyl peroxide is an oxidizer, I decided to look up some studies:

 

This one is about topical spearment reducing the harm from BP in mice:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/11039327  "The result suggests that spearmint is an effective chemopreventive agent that may suppress BPO-induced cutaneous oxidative stress, toxicity and hyperproliferative effects in the skin of mice."

 

And this one is about retinoic acids reducing the harm from BP

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/15225900

 

 

I noticed that somebody asked about how long this kind of toner stays good. A while back I looked at some research related to this. Unfortunately the catechins in green tea degrade quite rapidly. Under normal conditions you would find at home 50% were gone within the first 7 hours. Now, that's 50% starting from a lower concentration than what you get with so many teabags in a cup of water. Regardless, I wouldn't expect any tea to retain antioxidants for very long. You can extend the shelf-life somewhat by adding some vitamin C powder into the mix.

Stupidity burning thermonuclear hot...

http://scienceblogs....us-in-oncology/

I think I've read that review a couple of months ago (or at least the conclusion, since you had to buy the article itself and that wasn't exactly cheap). Wasn't it an evaluation of some 20+ clinical trials? There has been a similar review a couple of years ago, their conclusion was completely different, as it said (off the top of my head) that BP-containing products are important first-line treatments for acne. Anyway, I've lost count, but I've read many studies myself (obviously, several small ones and not all were of good quality), and when searching, I skimmed hundreds more. I wouldn't say that I've found insufficient evidence to recommend BP

You might as well be correct in this. I haven't looked at details about BP research. I just saw tthat study in my RSS feed and looked itt over. I got the impression from that study that that the evidence is quite limited and mostly compromising lower quality studies, but I may be wrong with this.

Of course there are quite a few studies where BP is compared to antibiotics or administered in combination with them.

So for sure not arguing that there's no evidence for BP or that it shouldn't be used. It's proven quite effective in clinical use.

I also wish more people in the natural health section would put on their thinking caps. Rampant nonsense and hatred of science is one reason I'm starting to really hate natural health.

Of course I can't blame them too much, since there was a time when my thinking cap was nowhere to be found. The movement somehow discourages critical thinking and impartial evaluation of evidence. But that's really not that relevant for this discussion.

Glad to hear we see eye to eye

This is the difference between real doctors and quacks. When you tell a real doctor about some imaginary illness they don't take advantage of you. But when you tell a quack, they immediately jump to the opportunity to throw a bunch of supplements and follow up visits at you. And people complain that doctors don't have ethics...

But having been there, I would suggest to pass liver flushes, colonics, herbal cleanses and other such things.

Since you are discussing my blog posts here, perhaps I should also chime in

Hi AbyBar! I understand your scepticism, but the guy behind acneeinstein.com is indeed a respected member here, though he does sell his own method, based on a holistic approach. Not that that's a bad thing, but it puts things in perspective. He will never promote something like BP.

Over the years I've become more skeptical and rational in my approach. I still like to rely as much as possible on natural solutions, but the hard reality is that 97%+ of what's promoted in alt-med and natural health websites is pure BS.

While I might not promote BP, I've come to think that it's good that we have it. When used properly it's one of the best anti-acne treatments currently available. Just recently I saw a study that showed the oxidative effect of BP actually mitigates the genetic problems in acne-prone skin by increasing Fox01 activity in the skin.

Of course BP can also irritate the skin and one has to be careful with it, but I think it has a place in acne treatment regimens.

Green tea looks promising, but the research is very preliminary, not comparable to all the research that was done on BP.

You would be surprised how little reserch there is even for BP. A while back I saw one systemic review of BP, and it concluded that most of the studies are small and of poor quality. I think it ended with the conclusion that there's insufficient evidence to recommend BP, ironic

Of course you are right that the studies in green tea are still preliminary. But I for one am not holding my breath that definitive studies would be conducted anytime soon.

The reason I write about green tea a lot are 1) it has a plausible mechanism to work (5-alpha reductase inhibitor) and anti-inflammatory, 2) it's been shown effective in several studies now (4 studies on acne, 1 on reducing sebum production and several for UV protective effect), 3) it's cheap to use.

But when I talk about green tea I don't mean that you should use it exclusively. I think it's much better idea to combine green tea with benzoyl peroxide. That's why I usually recommend following BP cream with green tea moisturizer.

Listen to this: "BP has been linked to cancer for a number of years and many research journal entries state  "benzoyl peroxide is a free radical-generating skin tumor promoting agent."

http://www.skintacti...skin_damage.htm
http://www.highonhea...reat-your-acne/

You can find many more ill effects i’m too scared to post now. There is no credible reason for her to be bias, she has nothing to gain from lying to you.  I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist with dirty hair, but medical companies get money off this stuff  and don’t think they care how they get it.

Actually, she has a very credible reason for bashing BP, ideological bias. As much as I agree that she's a good person with good intention (Fran) her posts filled with misinformation and scientific illiteracy, to the point where I get headache just from reading her posts now

Benzoyl peroxide is an 'evil chemical' that doesn't fit into her 'natural is best' and 'the way nature created us' bias. That's why she bashes it. If she were to do even a cursory research on BP causing cancer she would realize how wrong she is.

While it's theoretically possible for BP to cause cancer the studies that 'showed' this were done with animals using rather high doses and with substances that further increased the inflammatory and carcinogenic effect.

There is no credible data to show BP is dangerous to humans. In fact, I could even make the argument that BP can protect the skin. BP can actually reduce inflammation in the skin, by reducing bacterial counts and keeping the skin pores open. Who is to say that the constant inflammation from acne couldn't cause skin cancer? If so, then we could argue that by reducing acne BP may protect the skin from skin cancer. I'm not saying it does, but it's not a totally implausible argument.

These kind of beliefs that you can diagnose internal problems by looking at signs at certain parts of the body are quite common in older healing traditions, especially from Asia. Other variations include the tongue, eyes and one acupuncturist even claims he can tell you what's wrong with you by diagnosing your ear (because ear sort of resembles fetus, goes his rationalization). Needless to say, the accuracy of these diagnostics is never better than pure chance.

No harm in drinking a few cups of green tea a day, but I wouldn't replace water with it. Did you know that teas generally are very high in fluoride? Some studies note fluoride concentrations in teas are up to 10 times higher than safety limits on drinking water? This is not an issue if you don't drink too much of it, but if you replace water with green tea then you are going to dose yourself with high amounts of fluoride.

We still don't have enough reliable data to say much about probiotics. We know they work in some conditions, but the problem is that the benefits can be strain-specific, meaning that one strain works while other has no effect.

Many probiotics also cannot colonize the digestive system. They just pass through but have little long-term effect on the gut flora.

This is why I prefer to eat fermented foods daily. You'll often get a wider intake of probiotic strains, and you know you'll get live bacteria. With little regulation on supplements there's no way to say that those supplements have any viable bacteria.

So, which is better for those with acne and who suffer from digestive issues? Going Paleo, and avoiding even gluten free grains like rice and oats?

Or, simply avoiding only the grains that contain gluten, and eating the ones that don't contain it?

I'll skip the dairy, no matter what. I just am a bit confused as to which would be the best for my body; Paleo, or simply gluten-free?

It would kind of be nice to eat corn again, and not feel guilty about it...

I don't think it has to an either or issue. I don't see any good reason to limit yourself to those 2 choices. Rather listen to your body and see what happens after you eat certain foods. Digestive and health issues can be complex and rarely abide by human-defined rules (such as paleo and restricting gluten-containing grains).

Homeopathy is to medicine what Deepak Chopra is to quantum physics. The fact is that most homeopathic "medicines" are diluted to the point where they have not even a single molecule of the active ingredient left. They are pure water (plus the contaminants that got in during the manufacturing process) infused into sugar pills.

And even if they would have active ingredients in them it wouldn't be much better. Because of the, quite frankly, ridiculous theory homeopathic "medicines" are based on. For example, a homeopathic drug for celiac disease would be manufactured like this: Take little bit of wheat and dilute it with this ratio, 1 part wheat and 100 parts water. Remember to shake vigorously. Then take 1 ml of that solution and mix it with 100 ml of water. Again shake. Repeat that dilution 30 to 200 times, always remembering to shake vigorously with each dilution, and you'll have your medicine.

It's based on sympathetic magic and that water supposedly has memory (makes you wonder what water remembers during all its passes through the toilet!).

Homeopathy has been studied a lot, there's your tax payer dollars at work. While poorer quality studies show mixed results, some even positive because of laws of statistics, higher quality studies show homeopathy is no better than placebo.

So yes it can work for some people, but that's because of placebo effect and not because of any healing property of the "medicine".

I can give you more evidence-based answer. A few months back I looked at all the studies on gluten and skin issues. It's not been studied much, but we have a good handful of studies.

Perhaps the best one I've seen is one done with psoriasis patients. In their previous study the researchers found that 16% of psoriasis patients were gluten sensitive (they had positive test to gluten antibodies). Then they took a mixture of psoriasis patients with positive and negative gluten antibody test and put them on strict gluten-free diet for 3 months. Those who were diagnosed with gluten sensitivity improved whereas those who didn't have diagnosed gluten sensitivity showed no results. Other studies have found that gluten sensitivity is more prevalent in skin patients than healthy controls.

You can see the full post with all the studies references here: Gluten And Acne: Can Bread Give You Acne?

So there's no good evidence to say that going gluten free will benefit everybody with acne.

Now to the question that if you are not gluten sensitive is gluten just less bad or can you eat it without worries. That I'm not so sure about it. To date there's no convincing evidence that gluten causes widespread problems in generally healthy people.

That said there's more and more research coming out showing problems with gluten. I don't know, but I suspect that it will be a problem to a certain portion of the population.

Is it possible that gluten always causes some harm? Yes, but I'm sure you could say that with almost any food out there. The fact is that plants and animals don't like for us to eat them. So they figure out ways to deter us. I'm starting to think that it's just a matter of minimizing the damage - rather than choosing foods with no negative effects.