Seth's Blog

Acne.com, a website paid for by the drug company behind Proactiv, a common acne medicine, has the following:

Acne Myths & Claims: Certain foods cause acne. No, those french fries you had yesterday didn’t give you new zits today. In fact, scientists have been unable to find ANY substantial connection between diet and acne. So all the foods you’ve been afraid of — pizza, french fries, chocolate — are fine. Of course, that doesn’t mean you should binge on your favorites whenever you want — a healthy diet will help your body have the strength to help you in your fight against acne. So use your common sense, but don’t be afraid to indulge now and then.

“All the foods you’ve been afraid of are fine”? This is much too certain-sounding. The studies that failed to find a diet/acne connection were poor. Other research suggests that acne may well have a dietary cause. The false certainty is self-serving. Because foods don’t cause acne don’t bother trying to figure out which ones; just take our medicine! It resembles my surgeon claiming there was evidence that the surgery she recommended and would profit from was a good idea when there wasn’t any such evidence.

In contrast, acne.org has this:

Myth: Diet and acne are related. Reality: The bottom line is we need more research. We do know that people in some indigenous societies do not experience [any] acne whatsoever across the entire population. This is in stark contrast to the widespread presence of acne throughout all modern society. It leaves us to ponder the question of whether the indigenous people’s diet contributes to their acne-free skin. Discovering a dietary way of preventing acne may be a future reality, however, we may live so differently from our hunter/gatherer ancestors that it has become close to impossible to replicate our ancestral diet. But let’s see if we can work together to come to some consensus from our own experiences. If you feel that you have cleared your acne using a particular diet, or if you are planning on attempting a diet of some kind, please post your method on the Nutrition & Holistic health message board.

That’s reasonable and helpful. The website that couldn’t hire expensive experts had better information.

Reviews of Proactiv on acne.org.

Previous posts have implicated Western Civilization and face-washing with soap in the etiology of acne. What else might be involved? A reader writes:

My girlfriend suffered from acne for years. She went to a dermatologist, tried every fancy soap and skin cleansing system, but nothing worked. She was also a Diet Coke fanatic. Every morning while she was getting ready for work, like a coffee drinker, she’d have one. It was her daily jolt of caffeine.

When I read about your diet modification, part of which included giving up soda, and your subsequent acne disappearance [I found that Diet Pepsi caused acne], I of course told her about it. “No, it has nothing to do with my diet, it’s hormones and bacteria.” She was not about to give up her beloved Diet Coke! How else could she function in the morning? In the meantime, she would periodically get upset at what she called the “open sores” on her face.

About 9 months ago, she decided to go on a detox diet — not with the aim of treating her acne, but just to lose a couple pounds. It required her to eliminate as many artificial chemicals and preservatives from her diet as possible. Out went the Diet Coke. Within days, her skin cleared up. She hasn’t had a major breakout since.

Yet more evidence that acne is due to lifestyle factors and can be completely cured by lifestyle changes, often dietary. There should be a list somewhere, ordered from most to least likely, of lifestyle causes of acne. If you have acne you just go down the list eliminating each one in turn until you find the culprit.

Yes, to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But until someone comes up with a better explanation of why we like umami, sour, and complex flavors, I will continue to believe my explanation: We need to consume plenty of bacteria every day. If you fail to give such large and important systems as the digestive and immune system something they need a lot of, obviously many things will go wrong.

In the current New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni writes about a childhood in which he ate too much. He was chubby, but not because of ditto food (which I think is the main cause of the obesity epidemic). There was much less ditto food when he was young. Bruni seems to have gotten abnormal pleasure from non-ditto food. One sign of this is how clearly he remembers certain favorite foods:

I remember almost everything about my childhood in terms of food — in terms of favorite foods, to be more accurate, or even favorite parts of favorite foods. . . .

Age 7: I discovered quiche. Quiche Lorraine.

Age 8: lamb chops.

No mention of fermented food among the foods of his childhood. His family apparently ate a lot of frozen meat. If refrigerated food is dangerous, frozen food is probably worse. I suspect recently defrosted meat has less bacteria than meat that’s been in a refrigerator for several days.

I wonder if Bruni was (and is) like the squirrel who needed stronger-than-average light to entrain properly. All squirrels need light; a few need stronger light. Under healthy conditions (sunlight) the genetic diversity has no consequences.  I think the pleasure we get from complex flavors and the like can vary because of these experiences:

1. On a visit to New York, as I blogged, I noticed I was far less interested in fancy restaurants than in the past. The only change in my diet is that I now eat far more fermented food.

2. It isn’t just New York. In Berkeley I notice the same thing has happened. My interest in complex food has gone way down. Fancy restaurants, apart from the social aspect, are less interesting. My back issues of Saveur are less interesting. I read food sections of newspapers less.

3. Brain injury can cause something called the gourmand syndrome, where the person becomes obsessed with food with complex flavors. In one case the person became a restaurant critic (like Bruni).

Perhaps Bruni’s forthcoming book will shed more light on this. Everyone knows about the obesity epidemic and the allergy epidemic; less mentioned is the vast rise in interest in fancy food over the last 30 years. The word foodie was coined in 1981, close to when the sharp rise in American obesity began. Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, had until recently much bigger food sections than they had 30 years ago.

One indication of the severity of the epidemic of allergy and similar disorders is the existence of a magazine called Living Without. Judging by volume numbers, it is 11 years old. Supporting the idea that autism may be caused by digestive problems, two of the six events on their event list involve autism.

A professor complains about ivorytowerism:

In the epistemology of academia, no knowledge truly is knowledge if it is not vetted and approved through the channels it has established over time. Those channels are esoteric, made up of the “few, though worthy” who are the elect in the kingdom of knowledge. The epistemology of academia proceeds on the basis that the public has nothing to do with real knowledge. It doesn’t make any sense intellectually, of course, but it makes perfect sense if the primary goal is not really the development of knowledge but the preservation of a well-designed, internally self-confirming authority economy.

Some professors go further than this: The public shouldn’t know about academic research. Several years ago, a colleague of mine in the Berkeley psychology department was approached by a journalist. He was writing an article for The Atlantic about her area of research. She wouldn’t talk to him. She felt his article would somehow be wrong or unseemly.

Open access is changing this, of course. I’m a big beneficiary. Because my long self-experimentation paper was open access, it could be read by people outside of psychology. As a friend put it, “It cost Steve Levitt nothing to say he liked your paper.” Whereas inside psychology departments, you’d pay a price.