Continuing from my previous blog post on the hormonal aspect of acne, this one elaborates on how your diet can be another major trigger.
We all want to have our cake and eat it too, but when it comes to acne, a little discipline can go a long way with helping to alleviate your skin ailments.
There are some classic triggers for acne like chocolate, sugar, greasy foods, alcohol and dairy. For some, eliminating one or all of these foods clears up their skin in no time. Other times it seems to go deeper or be more elusive. One sign that your gut could be a factor in your acne is digestive symptoms like gas, bloating, constipation and diarrhea. When your gut is out of sorts, your skin commonly will be too.
The approach to healing your gut is not a one-size-fits-all. For some stress has taken a toll on their digestion and this is the target of healing. For others, long term or repeated use of antibiotics has brought on the symptoms and we need to work with probiotics to restore a healthy microbiome. For others their diet has suffered and we just need to regain a little discipline. And then there’s the IBS gut, or the chronic digestive symptoms that have come and gone or been constant throughout your life, and that’s when testing for food intolerances can be a game changer.
It’s a misnomer that if we test food intolerances it becomes a list of things you can never eat again. More accurately it’s a tool to help you better understand your relationship with food. You may have 10 foods come up on your intolerance test, but when we go through a re-introduction phase we aim to narrow down which ones are actually triggers for your acne (and your gut) and by cutting down on the ingestion of these foods, it normally allows us to still live a little and manage our skin. Yup, sometimes we can have our cake and eat it too (but in an informed way).
I’ve also looked into food intolerances in patients without digestive symptoms but with moderate to severe acne and sometimes we find some surprising links to foods unsuspected but that are causing an inflammatory reaction in the skin more perceptively than in the gut.
So if you suspect food may be a part of your puzzle or are curious to find out more about this link, we are here to help!
