In summer 2010 my health problems got noticeable worse (unrefreshing sleep, strange pains, strange sensations in the skin and other stuff I don’t want to share here ), and I had to do something. Furthermore I was gaining weight, I was suspecting something along the lines of Diabetes, or some other metabolic problem.

As I was looking into dietary changes, I stumbled over Wolfgang Lutz’s and Robert Atkins’ work. Being engineer by training, I figured that if blood sugar might be the problem (which, as it turned out, wasn’t the case for me), then reducing carbs might be a solution (stop fueling the problematic sub-system) – so both Lutz and Atkins appealed to me and I thought let’s give it a try (I was a bit frightened about such an radical change of diet – you read all kind of BS – but hey, I felt like I was going to die anyway).

Before the change, I ate a lots of white bread, some milk-chocolate and drank lots of milk. First I reduced carbs – like Lutz suggested, I tried to aim for 6 bread units – but within days I noticed that some problems (like the strange pain and skin sensations) diminished right away. The acne cleared up noticeable. So I thought why bother with low-carb, let’s go full no-carb (like Atkins suggests for some month).

And voila, with no-carb everything go better, and I started to feel healthy for the first time in my life. I lost over 30 pounds, all health problems either went away or were almost gone, and life started to become enjoyable. This was a period of about two months over with most problems went away, some fast, some slower.

So for over half a year I was focused on the carbs=evil scheme, started eating cheese again (hey, no carbs!), when slowly some of the health problems returned, my weight started to rise again.

At that point I panicked a bit and made a huge mistake: I thought I can figure this one out too, I have to do something right away. So I trusted what some doctors had written about an pathogen (which I tested for with borderline results), how to cure it (with over the counter medication like Vitamin D and NAC and other stuff) and I thought let’s try this too! The things I took made me worse, but as it was supposed to be a “die off”/”herx” reaction, I wasn’t too alarmed. Turned out that experiment cost me almost an year until I got better again. So for about a year I was not in the mood for big experiments and personal stuff like moving to another city kept me busy.

But slowly I introduced “safe starches” into my diet (like plantains), because kept reading one should not go too much low-carb. I tried out self-made sourdough rye bread (makes me enormously hungry, so I stopped again) and at one point I thought: What the heck, I’m going to eat ice-cream today – 3 hours later I got slightly noticable pimples and local inflammation (I think they are called nodules), and after another roughly 3 hours the acne was prominent.

After that, my suspicion was that milk might be bad for me, but maybe some properly “ripe” cheese like hard cheese (properly digested by bacteria) might be OK. So I waited for the acne inflammation to go back and tried again with an parmesan. Bingo, acne again, and again on the 3 to 6 hours timeframe.

So I didn’t touch milk or dairy again, but now I looked for raw milk cheese, as I read something about it being possibly better. After a while I found raw-milk-cheese, tried it – and got no acne. Tried again, after some time, with another brand – again no acne. Tried cheese from pasteurized milk – acne.

As I still have health problems, I am still in the process of figuring out things. Next up for me is trying to get rid of beef for a week or two, to see if that might be a problem for me.

In summary:
- I was not very systematic in my experiments, and had some lucky moments.
- All the macro-nutrient ratio paradigms are IMHO BS and not applicable for the majority (might make sense if someone has real/major metabolic problems like T1DM, etc.)
- Having said that, in my view some carb foods come with baggage: e.g. cereal grains and (pasteurized) milk
- A quickly reacting, non-dangerous, clearly visible (objective) surrogate health marker (in my case acne) is worth its weight in gold
- With such a marker, one should completely eliminate suspicious foods (in my case *ALL* dairy) and then introduce it again (two or three challenges)
- For me, pasteruized-milk-dairy=acne, raw-milk-dairy=no-acne
- Milk-chocolate is dairy
- Some surrogate health markers (e.g. weight) reacted “funky” for me: I changed my diet to no-carb, my weight went down, and without any big chances my weight started to climb again.
- I still have some residual health problems
- For most of the health problems that went away, I don’t know exactly what food (Cereal grains? Dairy? Vegetable oils? etc.) caused what problem
- As I felt like I was going to die on my old diet, I am not particular keen on going back full scale to my old diet to see if after one or two month all my old symptoms return, to erode which food caused which symptom…
- Medical science and several MDs helped me diddly squat
- For me, Paleo blogs were much more helpful than the medical community
- There are more tidbits I found out, but I lack the energy right now to write them down shortly
- There is a lot I still don’t know about my health problems

In closing:
In my view it is important to get ideas what may (or may not) be a problem, what experiments one can do safely (I had no problem with larger amounts of sat-fat, but two spoons of vegetable oil gave me a weird pressure in the temples…). The time delay between consumption and health effect is interesting to know too, some things act faster, some slower. While I think that I am not alone in that dairy causes acne, I think not everybody seems the same, and by now I wouldn’t be surprised if for some people acne is caused by other things besides dairy.

So much more to write, I guess …

P.S.: Some conditions are thought to cause acne (e.g. some adrenal issues) and I wonder if the medical science has the causation wrong, and in fact both the accompanying acne and the “primary” condition have both the same underlying cause (e.g. dairy).

I can now say with certainty that for me acne is caused by dairy from pasteurized cow milk. Three to six hours after I eat dairy, I get an outbreak of acne.

Though dairy is clearly the main cause for my acne, I sometimes get very very low level acne, which I haven’t been able to track down: Traces of dairy in my food? Traces of cereal grains? Nuts? A reaction to beef? Bacterias acting up? I simply don’t know (yet), this isn’t so clear cut as dairy=>acne.

And though I have *not* been able to trigger an acne out-break with cheese from raw milk, I remain suspicious that milk does more harm to my body than just acne. I had spurious “funky” symptoms after raw milk consumption. I had one low blood sugar episode and recently one swollen hard node (lymph node?), both after raw milk cheese consumption (again within the 3 to 6 hours timeframe).

So, if I parse down, antibiotics cure acne. A lot of people don’t want to take anti-biotics and/or accutane. All the poor doctor is saying is don’t take sandpaper to your face because that won’t help.

(Another thought — people with acne are in some way defective, and the acne is just a visual warning not to reproduce with them)

Seth: “Poor doctor”? I doubt she is poor. Statements like hers, as I say, block helpful research.

Seth: I don’t know why most people with H. pylori infection don’t get ulcers — in other words, the crucial difference between those who get ulcers and those who don’t. Probably it’s nutritional, although I’m not sure. I believe ulcers go away following antibiotic use because bacteria were somehow helping to maintain the ulcers.