I have been reading this topic for quite some time with great interest.

I also have noticed that when I'm on vacation and walking/staying out the entire day I can tolerate pretty much any food and I break out less. Also when Istay out for most of the day at home I notice the same.

But there's no way I can stay out for the entire day. What is your recommandation databased? Is it worse to f.ex eat high fructose containing foods like fruits before going to bed at night when you're staying indoors? I have to say that a lot of this is complicated. Is it best to eat a high protein/fat meal at night since this doesn't cause problems with fructose?

A number of people were starting to experiment with light and sleep. Any results?

I'm convinced that my nearly 4 months of perfect, clear skin was due to a chance coincidence: the daylight spectrum bulb I was using at my desk just happened to be the right intensity, distance, etc. to effectively suppress daytime melatonin. There has to be a connection between the fact that I was entirely clear, and also was sleeping better than ever (woke up totally refreshed, without alarm clock, same time each morning; went to sleep quickly, same time each night).

So it's back to the bulb. I just hope it doesn't screw up my eyes....

I'll buy a bulb in about 2 weeks, and if there is any effect at all, I'll report here

The seller I'll be buying from even claims that it still has UV radiation in it...so good, I guess. I mean, they must have some kind of reasoning behind it. And it has "ionisation air cleaning" lol. Whatever that means.

I'm still not sure if I should take the Vitamin B/C complex... I have had a few problems with pills in general in the past. My intestines dont seem to like that stuff.

I've been stalking this post for a while, and yes, I'll admit, I skimmed a lot of it. Two questions, and please don't judge, I already admitted I skimmed most of this....

Would taking a Zinc and vitamin D supplement have any similar or mirrored effects? I ask this because, like most people, I work indoors, and it is usually dark by the time I get off work. I also drive everywhere. (its practical!) I also have a very awful sleep schedule due to stress, I used to sleep pretty much 9 hours a night, and I cant seem to get back to that...

Once again, please don't judge, I'm a history major, so science doesnt really do it for me

I've noticed that since the past week, my face has been staying clear. What I'm doing new is that I shred some beats and eat a raw carrot alongside my chicken breast I eat for lunch. After eating dinner, I eat one serving of pumpkin seeds.

I also stopped eating bread and reduced from eating two bananas a day to one.

The only problem now is that the right side of my cheek has been clear for quite awhile, but over the past few days, the left side is a bit broken out. I do have red spots on the left side of my cheeks, so I'm wondering if bacteria likes to hide under those spots that helps form new pimples.

But there's no way I can stay out for the entire day. What is your recommandation databased?

a) Get the brightest lights you can positioned where

you spend the most time indoors. Select bulbs with

significant energy in the blue spectrum, and throw

in a UV ("black" light) bulb if possible.

b) Tend your sleep cycle.

c) Give up fructose. Just give it up. No fruits.

No soft drinks. etc.

d) Take a Vitamin B complex pill and a modest

zinc dose (e.g. 15mg) each evening.

IME, being acne-free (not mostly, not with just a few

exceptions, but 100% no acne every day) is easy

when living in outdoor light and not eating fructose.

Otherwise, it takes a lot of tedious work. YMMV, etc.

Would taking a Zinc and vitamin D supplement have any similar or mirrored effects?

There are good reasons to keep your Vitamin D levels

up all year 'round apart from acne. I can't tell if Vitamin

D was relevant to my acne or not because I've been

taking it for years. I can tell that Vitamin D was

not sufficient to affect my acne, since it didn't prevent

acne for me at all -- but that doesn't rule out the possibility

it is necessary but not sufficient. The acne-free Trobriand

Islanders clearly get plenty of year-round Vitamin D.

I doubt zinc will help much if you cannot achieve a

normal nightly nocturnal surge of melatonin. I wouldn't

bother taking a zinc pill if you: go to bed at different

times on different days, get little bright light exposure

during the day, take caffeine anywhere near bedtime,

intentionally sleep few hours each night, etc.

standing in the sun, my body is blasted with a massive dose of UVA. On the other hand, sitting in the shade but looking at the sky allows me to receive a dose of UVA that is too low for my skin to tan, but strong enough for my eyes/pineal gland to suppress melatonin. Is this correct?

It's a fact you can stand in the shade, look at the sky, and get a large dose of UVA to the retina. It's not a proven fact exactly what effect that has. I became interested in the possibility that UVA is a relevant component due to one old study on quail eyes that showed UVA (and green light) caused significant retinal changes. I became more interested when my personal experiments suggested that I could get by with less outdoor light if I got the exposure during peak UVA hours and removed my glasses. That's about all I know for sure on the subject today.

--------------------------------------------------

Now that nice weather is here, I bit the bullet and

and gave up my primary source of fructose: Coke.

This let me emulate all the the things I believe the

Trobriand Islanders do that is most relevant to being

acne-free:

a) All-day outdoor bright light (including UVA) in

the eyes.

b) Little or no fructose/lactose/alcohol.

c) Sleeping long and well, 9-10 hours each night.

Because my model says caffeine is fine if not

taken in a way that affects sleep, I substituted

green tea for my noon Coke (having previously

observed that green tea did nothing to help

or hurt my acne).

Wow. Finally dropping all fructose (the Trobriand

Islanders get little in the way of sweet fruits)

really sealed the deal. I stopped taking all other

pills. No zits. I stayed up late a night or two. No

zits. I slipped up and had a noon 32-oz Coke two

days in a row. No zits. It is really, really nice to not

be able to remember how many days it has been

since I had a zit.

I also did a little (anecdotal, unscientific) test on a

16-yo boy. He had moderate acne, and was living

a typical lifestyle that included staying up past

midnight, spending hours per day in a darkened

room playing video games, etc. He visited for

7 days, and I managed to encourage him to cut

off caffeine after 2pm, try to get to bed a little

earlier, stop using an alarm clock to wake up

(he immediately began sleeping >8 hours)

and I dragged him outside as many hours

each day as possible to expose his naked

eyes to the sky. Despite not cutting off his

fructose or giving him a Vitamin B pill or anything

else relevant (I was doing this without revealing

to him the point was to treat acne; having been

16 myself once, the last thing I wanted to do was

say the word "acne" to him), it appeared to me

that at the end of 7 days the number of visible

zits was cut about in half, and visible inflammation

was drastically reduced.

Again, anecdotal and unscientific, but it's the first

time I could test this model on someone I could

actually see and monitor to know for sure how

many hours of outdoor light exposure they got,

etc.

Ok. I go to bed the same time most nights, but I have a hard time actually falling asleep. Still a poor candidate for zinc supplements?

Also get limited sun exposure. But working on it... and gave up sodas.

databased,

I must say that your hypothesis on a good sleep cycle in preventing acne makes a lot of sense to me. I have gotten reasonably clear (~90%) by just avoiding dairy and using the caveman/water only regimen.

But i was never 100% clear. There were always new pimples forming right when the old ones were going down and i still managed to have 4-5 lesions at any given time. I have never been able to establish a regular sleep schedule with deep consistent sleep (although i have tried many times, its very hard for me to fall asleep, it takes anywhere from 1-2 hrs lying in bed) I know know that its probably because of my melatonin schedule.

Ive always speculated that sleep was the missing link. Thats when i did some researching and stumbled upon your post. Ive always had the suspicion that sleep affected acne but your research and testing totally comfirmed my suspiscion. I also didnt know that the consistency and quality of sleep had alot to do with it. Before i thought that getting 8 hrs of sleep was good no matter what time you got to sleep(leading me to sleep late and wake up late. I now know why my sleep has been so inconsistent and i have so much trouble falling asleep(i never supressed my daytime melatonin by getting sunlight)

Thanks to your work i will now double up my efforts to establish a new consistent sleep cycle. I am now 2 days strong and the results have been already surprisingly good. (most lesions going down/healing and only 1 emerging lesion) These are things i have begun to do:

1 bought an a/c unit for my room so i dont have to sleep in the heat(which prevents me from sleeping)

2 I blacked out my windows with tinfoil (i already had blinds and curtains)

3 Ill take a 30 mg zinc pill before bed

4 Drink low sodium v8 throughout the day for the lycopene

5 Take a powdered multi vitamin throughout the day mixed in with my v8 ( this powder is taken 3 times a day which is the standard serving and contains all the b vitamins and ample selenium (200mcg) it tastes like ass but it is a really good quality multi with other goodies such as D3/lycocpene/zinc and almost all the other essential vitamin and minerals

6 try to get as much sunlight outside as possible easpcially during 11am-3pm

7 try to avoid fructose as much as i can especially at night

8 munch on some pumpkin seeds before bed for the trytophan

9 I use a dawn simulator to wake up in the morning instead of an alarm clock. You attach this device to a lamp next to your bed and it slowly brightens up at a time that you set. Which wakes you up gradually using light instead of a jaring alarm clock.

10 I bought 4floursecent bulbs and accompanying fixtures from home depot. Will install in my room soon (92 cfl 5000 color temp bulbs)

I will report back with updates

I have a few questions question for you. You have said earlier in this thread that taking a melatonin supplement will not be helpful and may be detrimental if taken at the wrong time. Why is this? Would it be detrimental to take it before bed with your zinc? I have trouble falling asleep and i used to take a half a melatonin tab(1.5 mg) to help me sleep and that helped me. Is is because taking it regularly might shut down natural production of it once you come off of it? It would seem to me that if you wanted a night time surge of melatonin wouldnt a pill taken before bed help with this? Or am i mistaken?

Would taking a OTC sleep aid such as unisom (doxylamine) help or hurt anything?ill only use it on days i cant fall asleep.

Based on your knowledge will i get proper absorption of the vit b's/ selenium with all the other vitamins and minerals in my multi vitamin? I am not aware of any interactions between the b vitamins and other nutrients. I was wondering if you knew of any.

Thanks and keep up the good work

Ok. I go to bed the same time most nights, but I have a hard time actually falling asleep. Still a poor candidate for zinc supplements?

I sure wouldn't use a large dose. I doubt most doctors would begrudge any adult 15mg/day of zinc.

If you're having trouble falling asleep, you most likely aren't getting that crucial melatonin surge, since it's the key hormone to put you to sleep.

If you can't get much outdoor time, try getting it when the sun is at its peak and make sure there's no glasses or anything else between your eyeballs and the sky.

Debugging sleep problems can be difficult.

• Taking a Vitamin B complex?
• Going to bed at the same time each night?
• Got a darkened bedroom to sleep in?
• Are you too wound up worrying about things to fall asleep, or just don't feel sleepy?
• Taking any caffeine within 8 hours of bedtime? Caffeine can sneak in with chocolate and a few other foods...
• Getting any kind of daily exercise?

You have said earlier in this thread that taking a melatonin supplement will not be helpful and may be detrimental if taken at the wrong time. Why is this?

How do you time when the melatonin will hit which parts of the body? If it's sublingual, then you can't really get any timed release effect, so you get one "jolt" at best -- will that send the right hormonal signal? I'm dubious. If it's oral, then you have to get it past the colon, which has its own stockpile of melatonin, and what the colon is doing appears to be poorly understood.

Also, one requirement for making melatonin is tryptophan, which is also a requirement for making serotonin. Is elevating melatonin levels at the right time enough, or is it also important to good sleep to get sufficient tryptophan into the brain so that calming serotonin can be produced in the evening?

Melatonin is a timed, multi-hour rising and falling hormonal signal in the body, and it's just not clear how much good you can do trying to get the same effect with a pill. Or, to put it another way, nobody's really found melatonin pills to be a very stellar cure for insomnia, and there are logical reasons why that is.

If melatonin helps you get to sleep, I would favor it over any other drug -- unless that drug has been extensively studied for its effects on the melatonin cycle. It's definitely possible to have sleep without having a normal melatonin cycle.

Based on your knowledge will i get proper absorption of the vit b's/ selenium with all the other vitamins and minerals in my multi vitamin? I am not aware of any interactions between the b vitamins and other nutrients. I was wondering if you knew of any.

Don't know of any convincingly important interactions. My current belief is that the real trick is getting the daytime bright light to stimulate digestion so that these nutrients (and everything else!) get digested well at all. If you do that, then you'll get more of the key ingredients from just plain old food as well, and the pills become less relevant.

Ok. I go to bed the same time most nights, but I have a hard time actually falling asleep. Still a poor candidate for zinc supplements?

I sure wouldn't use a large dose. I doubt most doctors would begrudge any adult 15mg/day of zinc.

If you're having trouble falling asleep, you most likely aren't getting that crucial melatonin surge, since it's the key hormone to put you to sleep.

If you can't get much outdoor time, try getting it when the sun is at its peak and make sure there's no glasses or anything else between your eyeballs and the sky.

Debugging sleep problems can be difficult.

 

• Taking a Vitamin B complex?
• Going to bed at the same time each night?
• Got a darkened bedroom to sleep in?
• Are you too wound up worrying about things to fall asleep, or just don't feel sleepy?
• Taking any caffeine within 8 hours of bedtime? Caffeine can sneak in with chocolate and a few other foods...
• Getting any kind of daily exercise?

 

I've since stopped wearing sunglasses and trying to just spend a little more time outside each day. The sleep problems are new. I used to sleep like a baby. I dont take caffine before bed, so I've narrowed it down to stress and worrying too much. 🙁 cant help it. My skin is my stressor mostly, and if thats not good, then everything suffers...

I've narrowed it down to stress and worrying too much.

Brings to mind oft-used treatments like:

a) Learn the relaxation response (see local library) and

practice near bedtime.

b) Reserve time before bedtime to write down the

current list of worries, note which ones you have

a plan to address, which are unimportant, etc.,

until you end up confident there is no point in

worrying about any of them until at least the

next morning.

I've narrowed it down to stress and worrying too much.

Brings to mind oft-used treatments like:

a) Learn the relaxation response (see local library) and

practice near bedtime.

b) Reserve time before bedtime to write down the

current list of worries, note which ones you have

a plan to address, which are unimportant, etc.,

until you end up confident there is no point in

worrying about any of them until at least the

next morning.

 

Yeah, I know its mind over matter. But I really struggle not stressing. Over everything. Well, I used to never stress until I got a little acne, now they go hand in hand. I cant seem to just relax sometimes. And I have a terrible time meditating. I cannot sit still!

I'll give B a try tonight. Thanks so much.

I don't know if this applies to you, but I think I'm automatically more stressed when infront of a computer. I dont know why, but there is just some kind of inner tension all the time. So less time in front of the PC I guess. Which is not doable for me, but well.

Wow. I just read the original post in this thread. Very interesting. After shaving my beard off over two weeks, I haven't had any real outbreaks with my acne. Just a minor whitehead around the nose area, here and there. And what's interesting about this read is that I work outdoors. Walking seven miles a day, delivering the mail. I'm a hat hater and sunglasses hater, too. Both cause me to break out. Everyday on break, I'll eat three Oatmeal Cream Pies. Close to 1,000 calories eaten in five minutes. And I'm 5'10" and 175 lbs. I never gain weight regardless of what I eat. The part of your post where you talk about getting sunlight instead of being indoors and what it does to the body makes sense. And I sleep very good. My only problem is the caffiene. Diet mountain dew and coffee drinker here. I just started taking a zinc supplement. Question for you and others taking it. Does it make you fart more? It does me. But I already notice better digestion. Even better sleep. And more energy. I can't smell. Haven't for years. Is taking 100 mg a day okay? And this whole copper equation stuff is kind of scary.

Anybody here have pictures of their indoor light setup? I think my indoor light source is too weak. I thought one bulb would have been sufficient, but the intensity just isn't enough. Plus I sometimes sit or stand too far back from the light source.

Question for you and others taking it. Does it make you fart more?

Zinc has never made me fart, but I'm pretty sure that eating three Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies would. I'm guessing that's close to 100g of sugar, with a big chunk of it being fructose (walmart.com lists the first ingredient by weight as corn syrup!). If you give up the fructose, I would predict you wouldn't need to take any zinc supplement. I drink caffeine daily and haven't had any acne for weeks -- but I cut it off 8 hours before bedtime.

With your job, I would predict the only thing keeping you from being 100% acne-free every day is the massive fructose intake. (Unless you've got a hefty source of some other types of hard-to-digest sugar hidden in your diet.) I bet you could drop the fructose, munch on glucose tablets all day, and not have a problem.

Anybody here have pictures of their indoor light setup?

Got no picture, but it's 6 4-foot bulbs horizontal on the wall about 3 feet from my face.

EDIT:

Purchased T8 Philips F32T8 and a pair of fixtures.

Recap:

Zinc is one of the longest-studied nutrients that correlates with statistically significantly less acne. Some months ago, I discovered that around 200mg/day of zinc picolinate could, under some circumstances, make me dramatically acne-free for the first time ever. That led to a very long course of study, research and experiments.

For a megadose of zinc to affect acne dramatically, a good bet was that zinc is a cofactor in a reaction that affects acne. If you have a chemical reaction in the body like Zinc + X -> Y, then flooding the area with zinc will at least modestly increase the production of Y, since it makes it more likely that all the available "X" will get used up. After much study, I concluded that "Y" is actually zinc superoxide dismutase, or ZSOD. ZSOD comes with the usual labels people grope for in acne cures: anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory, etc.

But then, what is the "X" that must be combined with zinc to make this reaction? If I have to overdose on zinc to get enough "Y", the implication is that what I'm really deficient in is "X". Like most people in America who eat meat, it's highly unlikely that there is any lack of zinc in my diet. If I could remedy my deficiency in "X", then I should be able to be acne-free without taking any zinc.

More study led me to conclude that "X" is melatonin. Melatonin slows cell division. It may decrease the production of androgens right in the skin. And perhaps most importantly, melatonin crosses the cell membrane and directly stimulates your DNA to produce the precursor to ZSOD, the molecule that zinc must combine with in order to create ZSOD.

Experiments with melatonin were immediately fruitful. By tending to my sleep cycle, I was soon able to be acne-free on less zinc, but still could not be acne-free reliably for long periods without any zinc supplement. Something was still missing.

The final piece of the puzzle was finding the fairly recent discoveries that show that, in modern life, we fail to effectively suppress daytime melatonin because we live in relatively dim indoor light. When you don't effectively suppress daytime melatonin by having your eyes in outdoor light all day long, two bad things happen. First, your gut thinks it's nighttime and you get carbohydrate malabsorption that keeps it from effectively digesting tryptophan (the fuel your body needs to make melatonin) and (tada!) zinc! Second, you get a "flattened" melatonin curve when you sleep at night -- your body simply doesn't produce the giant burst of melatonin at night that nature intended. The data fits this hypothesis nicely, including the most obvious points:

 

• Do low zinc levels correlate with acne? Yes.
• Do low tryptophan levels correlate with acne? Yes.
• Do low ZSOD levels correlate with acne? Yes.
• Can this explain why primitive tribes are acne-free? Yes.

This effect of daytime light is simply astounding. For example, I have long struggled with the ability to consume legumes. I bought into the standard advice that it's a problem of gut flora, if you eat them long enough your gut will adjust and digest them better without gas, etc. If I had a large Coke and a large burrito, the result was 100% predictable: great intestinal discomfort. However, I now know that was simply another problem of failing to suppress daytime melatonin. By living in outdoor light all day, I can slam down a Coke+burrito with zero intestinal discomfort, hardly any gas at all. I've repeated this experiment reliably several times, and outdoor light exposure is like a light switch (heh!) on my ability to digest legumes. I speculate that the growth in acid reflux disease (and the esophageal cancer it can lead to) is probably another result of living in dim light during the day that produces carbohydrate malabsorption.

The unfortunate thing is, although the pill-free cure for my acne is conceptually very simple, it's also very hard for modern people to accomplish. I had to buy a laptop with an extra-bright screen so I could work outdoors during the day -- most people have indoor jobs with no option of working outdoors. Just look at some the many ways we guarantee we won't have a natural melatonin cycle:

 

• Work indoors all day. Indoor light simply does not produce the definitive OFF signal for pineal melatonin that outdoor light does. Even on a severely overcast day, outdoor light is much more intense (and also simply contains much more of the blue-green frequencies most effective at shutting down melatonin production).
• Sleep in the midst of light pollution. Ironically, while bright light is needed to shut melatonin all the way off, very little light is needed to depress the nighttime surge of melatonin that you need to make lots of ZSOD. A night light, a street light shining into your bedroom. Trying to sleep when the sun is up. Flipping on a light when you go to the bathroom. All easy ways to destroy your nocturnal melatonin surge.
• Go to bed at different times. Want to catch that late movie on the weekend? It's just like a form of jetlag -- your body's 24-hour clock just got bumped and may take days to settle back down to match your regular bedtime again.
• Take in lots of caffeine. Caffeine will both depress your nocturnal melatonin peak and shorten the hours you sleep, both ways to become melatonin-deprived.
• Vegetarianism. Without meat, it becomes more difficult to get enough tryptophan and zinc in the diet. If you combine that with eating high-fructose foods like apples, pears, etc. and living in dim light during the day to produce fructose malabsorption, that greatly raises the odds of acne. This is not to say you can't be a vegetarian and acne-free, but it is plausible that some vegetarians might have to take a couple of pills to get there.
• Sunglasses, hats, travel in cars, etc. If you compare modern people to the completely acne-free primitive tribes that still exist, it's almost like we are comically trying to avoid getting any daylight in our eyes. We stay indoors all day. When we travel, we run from shaded building to shaded car (often with dark-tinted windows). We cover our eyes with dark glasses not just when the light is bright, but often just as a fashion statement when the light isn't even bright at all!
• Depression. Depression and a screwed-up melatonin cycle often go hand-in-hand. But of course, acne itself is strongly correlated with depression. This is a real chicken-and-egg scenario. What causes what? The mess is more complicated by the fact that anti-depressants may tinker with the melatonin cycle for better or worse themselves. What is easy to say is that it would be better to not be depressed if you want a normal melatonin cycle (but that may be a complete tautology for some people!).

A Zinc-less Zinc Regimen

I probably can't think of all the inventive ways people destroy their melatonin cycle, but here's the basic remedy to achieve natural levels of melatonin and ZSOD:

• Go to bed at the same time each night.
• Sleep in total darkness. (Black out your bedroom, go to sleep when the sun goes down, wear a sleep mask, never turn on a light in the middle of the night, etc.).
• Avoid caffeine, especially evening caffeine.
• Spend all day in outdoor light without sunglasses or hats.
• Sleep >= 8 hours. (This becomes easy when you stop megadosing caffeine and suppress your daytime melatonin.)

FAQ

That's too hard. I just can't...

Since I've been doing it for weeks now, I agree with you. I have the luxury of being able to choose to work outside, but it's a pain -- I essentially do office work out on my deck. It's a pain to say I can't go to that midnight movie. It's a pain to put tinfoil on the bedroom windows, wear a sleep mask, etc. It's a pain to open every shade in the house every morning and get my eyes outside ASAP. All I can say is, it's nothing like the pain of cringing when I have to go out in public with acne.

Can't I just take a pill?

Since there are periodic reports in the medical literature of people who hurt themselves by taking extreme doses of zinc (400mg/day, 800mg/day, even more) for their acne, I suspect you can just take a pill, but it could send you to the hospital eventually. I could argue in great detail why you cannot achieve the desired effect by taking melatonin orally, but the fact is many people have tried melatonin pills for acne and they just don't cure it. A melatonin pill before bedtime might help you sleep a little better and jumpstart a busted melatonin cycle, but you really won't need that if you effectively suppress your daytime melatonin. Put another way, if you need that bedtime melatonin pill to sleep, you probably still have a busted melatonin cycle.

Why me? How come my acne-free friends can...

I used to just throw my hands up at this and invoke the fairy dust of "it must be our genes". However, now that I have a detailed theory of the mechanism of acne that seems to me to hold water, I can say that there's a decent chance it's "you" in significant part because you are doing some things different than your friends. For example, in college, were most of my friends staying up until 4am and virtually never going outside like me? Hmmmm, not really. And once you induce carb malabsorption by screwing up your melatonin cycle, then suddenly all the Coke I love to drink does make some difference, and the formerly confusing fact that trying to eat "healthy" by eating fruit really didn't work is incredibly frustrating. The fact is, I suspect I can induce acne in most of the "acne-free" people you know: just keep them in dim light all day every day, keep them in bright light when they're trying to sleep, give them lots of high-fructose foods with every meal (Coke or apples -- your choice), and supply lots of caffeine. There may well be a genetic component to the "why me?" question, but it may be quite small compared the actual details of your acne-inducing lifestyle.

What about dairy?

I still don't know. The fact is, while living the outdoor lifestyle, I have been able to eat a suspicious amount of ice cream without the usually reliable cystic acne response, but I haven't pushed it. It is plausible that the mechanism for dairy producing acne is not beta cellulin, but simply sugar (lactose), and that once carbohydrate malabsorption is cured by suppressing daytime melatonin, dairy isn't a problem. But I do not yet feel certain of that.

Are you acne-free? What pills are you taking?

Every week that I stick with all the rules to maintain my melatonin cycle, I'm acne free. In fact, I sometimes cheat and have caffeine, or miss my bedtime. That sometimes results in a zit, but not always. I stopped taking zinc. I have stopped taking my normal complement of vitamins for a couple of weeks and stayed acne-free, but won't give them up for longer than that because I start getting arthritis.

Maybe it's just Vitamin D?

No. I've been Vitamin D replete for years (>50ng/dl) with no effect on acne. It's possible that if you're horribly Vitamin D deficient (many modern people are) you won't be able to absorb zinc well, compounding your problems. While working outdoors, I work in the shade with no direct sunlight on my skin (though as much view of sky in my eyes as possible). The only times my skin is in direct sunlight is when the sun is low in the sky (little UVB). So, despite spending massive hours outdoors, I haven't tanned at all so far this year. As always, any hope that Vitamin D is really a significant factor in curing acne has to overcome the hurdle of explaining why there's no epidemiological evidence that it varies strongly with latitude (Canadians should have way more acne than Texans if Vitamin D were crucial to the disease).

Can I do [...] instead?

Who knows? But if it's really important to you to get rid of the acne, set aside 2 weeks where you can strictly control your light exposure, and see whether this works. I say "set aside", because I find this regimen amazingly hard. The indoors couch is like a magnet for my butt; I initially had to literally keep a stopwatch outside to keep from fooling myself that I was spending more hours outside than I really was. If you can do it religiously for 2 weeks and it doesn't eliminate all new acne, then the heck with me and my theory. If it does, then you've gained some understanding of how you can control the disease and you can do your own experiments and make your own trade-offs.

I have low Vit D due to lack of animal protein in my diet (or low levels of it) so my doc has me on some pills to kick start me back up to normal and then a daily dose as required. After the weekly pill she expected me to feel better, or feel SOMETHING different, and I did not. Same with my B12 shots, my B12 was very very low as well, and getting it back up has not helped me feel different than I did before I started the shots.

I'm also sensitive to dairy (not really lactose intolerant as I can drink organic and suffer MILD issues) but it looks like the process of flash pasteurization is what affects me as organic is not treated the same way. I don't drink a lot (again, not helping the Vit D) but what I do drink is normally Lactaid with some added calcium or whatever they advertise these days.

Ok. I go to bed the same time most nights, but I have a hard time actually falling asleep. Still a poor candidate for zinc supplements?

I sure wouldn't use a large dose. I doubt most doctors would begrudge any adult 15mg/day of zinc.

If you're having trouble falling asleep, you most likely aren't getting that crucial melatonin surge, since it's the key hormone to put you to sleep.

If you can't get much outdoor time, try getting it when the sun is at its peak and make sure there's no glasses or anything else between your eyeballs and the sky.

Debugging sleep problems can be difficult.

 

• Taking a Vitamin B complex?
• Going to bed at the same time each night?
• Got a darkened bedroom to sleep in?
• Are you too wound up worrying about things to fall asleep, or just don't feel sleepy?
• Taking any caffeine within 8 hours of bedtime? Caffeine can sneak in with chocolate and a few other foods...
• Getting any kind of daily exercise?

 

I have problems sleeping since I find myself a light sleeper (cat can be throwing up 3 rooms away and I'll hear it and shoot out of bed as soon as it happens) which does not help room noises of ANY sort. I find sometimes I'm worrying about things as I go to bed, but I don't find them to truely keep me awake. I probably don't get as much exercise as I should, so that's an area to work on. I don't go to bed the same time (11-12pm every night) but even when I go to bed early I still am horribly tired in the morning after more than 8 hrs slept. My bedroom is fairly dark (not overly, but 80% there) with the only issue the morning light as the sun rises.

Thoughts?

Thoughts?

I don't think supplementing Vit. D. is going to be accompanied by some sort of feeling or sensation...i.e., you're not going to notice anything different on the day to day level.

Regarding sleep, here are my two cents:

This weekend, forgo all parties and social gatherings (just for this weekend). On Saturday, set your alarm for 7:00am. Go for a walk. Between 11:00am and 3:00pm, slather on a lot of sunscreen, and spend it all outside. Hiking, bicycling, playing basketball, doing yard work, running around the block, whatever. Just don't wear sunglasses. Do whatever you want in the late afternoon, evening, even staying inside a dark room playing video games, doesn't matter after 4 hours of sun. By 9:30pm, you'll be exhausted. Fall asleep by 10:30. Set your alarm clock for 7:35am. Wake up next morning at 7:30 without even needing your alarm clock. Go for a walk, or skip it. Between 11:00 and 3:00pm, slather on....you get the idea.

You'll be amazed how quickly you can go from night person, to morning person.

Brahms are you back doing the indoor light or are you using good ol' natural sunlight?

I'm doing both. I try to get an hour or so around noon of sunlight, either while I eat lunch and/or on a walk or run. I also use a simply compact flueoresecent daylight spectrum bulb at my desk. Seems to be working again.

Databased:

Did you give up tomatoes as part of your no-fructose diet? Also, can you stay acne free while eating something such as an entire box of wheat thins every day?

I got my 2 daylight lamps today

Both 32W, and it says on the packaging "1600 lumens, equivalent 120W", whatever that means. But they must be good, they cost ~80 Euro both.

I don't think you have mentioned it before databased: Do you dim your lights in the evening, close before bedtime? I could move them farther back to simulate fading light of the day.... although I read somewhere that evening light isn't really that much weaker than daylight, just has a different color. (more red, I think)

Mine says on the packaging: "5800 kelvin, CRI 96". If those aren't perfect, I don't know what

Eating walnuts can increase your melatonin levels:

http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/W...nin-shows-study

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15979282