Does chocolate cause acne?
Acne affects about 1 in every 10 people in the world, making it perhaps the eighth most common disease in the world. What is the role of nutrition? Well, let’s go back a century when textbooks on dermatology recommended different dietary restrictions. For example, people with acne would be recommended to avoid foods like pork, sausage, cheese, pickles, pasta, cakes, cocoa and chocolate. Yes, but old-fashioned medicine is full of goofy theories. Dr. Kellogg, for example, blames masturbation for acne. However, this is not something that cannot be resolved with a little cornflakes… Population surveys have found a link between acne and food consumption like dairy, sweets and chocolate, but there is no way to know if there is a cause and effect … until we check. There are high quality reports, such as the Harvard Nursing Study, which treats nearly 50,000 women and finds a connection between drinking milk from teens and acne, especially skimmed milk, something that is also found in teenage boys. Initially, they thought the reason maybe the hormones in the milk, but may be the milk protein, whey, of which is added to skim milk, to make it less watery, which may play a direct role in the formation of acne or is a hormonal carrier.
This would explain cases like this: where whey protein powder is involved in accelerating the sudden outbreaks of acne in teens with acne that just didn’t go away until they stopped taking the whey. This does not appear to be a protein-only effect, as soy protein supplements for example does not appear to cause the same problems. But for dairy products, in terms of intervention studies, all we have is these series of cases. If we do a systematic review of the acne and nutrition issue, we will get results like those for dairy products: of about 20 acne and dairy documents, about three-quarters find side effects, and the rest report no effects, with no studies finding beneficial effects of dairy products on acne; so we can look at it and come to a conclusion, that the dairy-free diet is worth the try.
But this is based on low-grade evidence, Grade C and D evidence, where C surveys include population surveys, and D is something like these sequences of reported cases. What we ideally want is randomized interventional studies, degree of evidence A and B, that we don’t have for dairy products, but we have some for chocolate. When it comes to acne, there is no food that is more branded worldwide than chocolate.
So if you are the chocolate maker association, how will you do the research, to make your product not look so bad? Well, you can always use the old trick of pharmaceutical companies to put your product against something even worse; and so the researchers gave one group of people chocolate bars and fake chocolate on the other, made from partially hydrogenated vegetable oil: trans fat.
So, let’s have more sugar, put in some milk protein and turn it into 28% pure trans fat, Crisco-style processed fat. And surprise, surprise, people had just as many pimples, as much as those who take fake chocolates, which allows them to conclude that taking large amounts chocolate is not a problem, when it comes to acne. And the medical community supported this claim. “Are we guilty, that we take the babies out of the babies? ”
“Too many patients support the delusion, that their health could be somehow mysteriously damaged from something in their diet. ” This initial study, “which finds that chocolate consumption probably does not cause acne, remains virtually unchallenged for decades and continues to be cited ” even in contemporary reviews. For example, this journal of pediatrics. It was demonstrated years ago, that chocolate consumption has no effect on acne.
“This serves as a warning example how “research-based evidence” should be carefully examined before being enrolled in clinical practice. ” Just because something was posted to the Journal of the American Medical Association, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good study, especially when it comes to the interests of the industry.
Maybe we should tell patients with acne try not only to reduce sweet and dairy products, but also trans fat, which are found in partially processed vegetable oils, but we cannot sound unambiguous in your tips for acne sufferers as to which foods to include and which to exclude while… they are not tested in well-designed randomized controlled clinical trials. But there were none such acne studies until… NOW, which we will cover in the next video.
Read More: Saving Lives By Treating Acne With Diet
