After 6+ years of acne all over my back, and for a while my chest, and trying every single treatment on the face of the Earth to no avail, I can tell you with almost complete certainty that it is dairy that was causing my bacne.

Here's some background:

My bacne started when I was about 16 years old, and would sporadically come and go with anywhere from 1 to 7 huge, cystic zits usually about the size of a dime, but could be as big as a quarter sometimes.

I tried everything and anything, heres a list off the top of my head:

Salslyic acid - made things 100% worse, hands down the worst product

Dan's Regimin - again made things worse, I noticed rubbing my back always made things worse

Benzoyl peroxide- worked great, but I never had the patience to do it consistently

ACV- didnt make things worse, but it smelled terrible and made my bed smell

minocyclin- helped get rid of zits, but didnt help prevent them

clindamycin- stopped taking it after i found out it can cause lupus

head and shoulders - didnt help

calamin lotion- worked great to make zits go away quickly, but didnt prevent

zinc pills - didnt help and made me nauseous

so after 6 years and all of these attempts to get rid of the bacne, i sadly decided to accept that i was going to have bacne for the rest of my life and there was nothing i could do about it.

then one day i was researching and heard that cow products, ie milk and cheese, had been linked to causing acne. i started to connect the dots between my intake of cheese/milk and my bacne:

1) my bacne usually would blow up after a weekend. usually at college after nights of drinking, (usually every thurs, fri, sat) i would always wake up hungover and just get a pizza or mcdonalds, loaded with cheese obviously. during the week, on the other hand, i usually avoided cheese and would eat healthy and go to the gym and all that good stuff.

2) when i was living at home for 3 months after college, my italian family would constantly be eating pizza, chicken parm, calzones, cheese rolls, etc. not to mention for lunch every day id make a sandwich with cheese on it, just because there was cheese in my house (id never buy cheese at school). Needless to say not only was my bacne the worst its ever been during this time, constantly 3 to 5 zits on my back at a time, but my facial acne, which id have under control since i was sophmore in high school, came back and was terrible all over my jaw line.

After thinking about all of this i decided to try one last desperate attempt to end my miserable always shirted existence and cut out the cheese.

It took a few weeks, (I was told to be patient as it can take a while for your pores to totally unclog from the dairy), but finally the acne has been consistently gone for a few months now.

i also decided to take one for the team and do a little experiment. when i was home over christmas break, i got drunk and ate about a full box of bagel bites, and also ate a dip my aunt makes with a ton of cream cheese in it. well when i woke up a few days later, after a few months of no bacne, i had two HUGE cystic zits on my back, one of them was literally the biggest one ive ever had.

so there you have it, if youve been struggling with cystic acne and cant seem to get it to go away, try cutting dairy out of your diet.

now i just need a good treatment to get rid of the scars...oh well, im on my way!

hope this helps.