Does Dairy Cause Cystic Acne?

Cystic acne caused by dairy?

… having suffered with cystic acne all my life, I recently discovered that milk is the cause. It makes sense since I was allergic to milk as a child but didn’t think about the effects it would have in my adulthood. I’ve [quit] drinking or eating anything with dairy and haven’t had a new cyst for 4 months. Prior to the non-dairy diet, I would get a cyst every 2 weeks. Anyway, if you’ve been a long time sufferer, maybe avoiding milk will help you too.

One more:

… a few years ago I decided I’m gonna stop drinking milk, and I WAS drinking only lactose free milk for a while but I read something about milk contributing to hair loss and cysts, so just stopped drinking milk and switched to almond milk (kroger family stores has the best one, closest in consistency and flavor to real milk than any other alternative)… guess what? NO MORE THIGH CYSTS! …

A Cause of Chronic Immune System Activation

You want to know a secret? An overlooked cause of chronic immune system activation?

It's right there on your plate: Nutrition.

Forget about "gut flora disbalance" or somesuch BS. Forget about makebelieve "latent viruses" supposedly hiding somewhere in the tissue (hiding like commies during McCarthy's withhunt). If you want to know what has the potential to activate the immune system, you should look on your plate.

For decades I had acne (and other inflammation of the skin) and it only receded when I reduced dairy. When I increased dairy again, the acne came back. Over the past year  I had to learn that acne can be caused by other (ruminant) animal products like veal, lamb or sheep.

Got milk? Maybe that's the reason you got an activated immune system.

Connecting gut problems with nutrition should be easy, one thinks. So if one has known gut problems, why not think about nutritional causes? And from my experience, I can say that skin tissue (and oral mucosa) can be affected by nutrition – and the skin is probably (considering the path nutrients take through the bloodstream) the furthest away from the gut*. So it is only a small leap to consider that every tissue between the gut and the skin can be affected negatively by nutrition. Right?

There is only one way to find out: Do an elimination diet. (Almost) no doctor will help you that, no "multi-center microbiology deep-sequencing study" will help you with that, and certainly no virus-hunter (real or imaginary) will help you with that.



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* Unless of course you consider that mathematically the gut wall and the skin are part of the same surface. And that evolutionary the different epithelial tissues might be very closely related anyway.

A Sensible Elimination Diet

A sensible elimination diet:

My elimination diet started yesterday, so it's too soon to know anything. Right now, I'm getting used to the restrictions and figuring out how to handle them while still actually eating.…

Here's the list of foods I can't have for the next 30 days:

• All dairy products,
• All gluten-containing products,
• All processed foods,
• All refined sugar,
• Most sweeteners, including honey, molasses, brown sugar, and corn syrup,
• All nightshade vegetables/fruits (tomatoes, green peppers, potatoes, etc.),
• Corn and corn-containing products,
• Fatty meats, including beef, pork, and veal,
• Alcohol,
• Caffeine,
• Processed foods,
• Vinegar,
• Peanuts and pistachios,
• Eggs,
• Margarine, shortening, and refined oils,
• Strawberries and citrus.

And BTW:

My rheumatologist has been prescribing this diet for years, and she says she's seen a lot of people make remarkable progress with it. One woman with rheumatoid arthritis and fairly severe joint damage not only lowered her pain and inflammation on this diet, the doctor told me, her joints actually began to repair themselves. Another patient went from nearly bedridden to out working in the garden in just a couple of months. She mentioned several other success stories, many with the added benefit of weight loss.

Just When I Lose Interest in the ME/CFS Freak Show…

By now I am convinced that ME/CFS is not a monolithic disease, but a pool of superficially similar looking diseases. Take a large enough group of persons diagnosed with ME/CFS (regardless of which criteria used), then maybe 12% have "disease A", 10% have "disease B", 8% have disease C and so on. And I think that most people who research or write about ME/CFS are naive at best, and idiots at worst (with Light and Snell being the notable positive exceptions). And quite frankly I doubt that anything that comes with the "ME/CFS" label will help me regain my health.

But when an anonymous commenter* pointed me to some links, and I saw one about Lipkin I was intrigued. Lipkin may or may not be onto something – only time will tell. And it looks like some results from the Lipkin/Honig study are in. Unfortunately only one unreliable person has blogged about this (and as is typical for him he mumbles many things together, in order to spread optimism to those poor ME/CFS patients) – so I will have to wait until I find something more solid (like e.g. Research1st).

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* And to answer: I am not interested in some voodoo "gut treatment". I think the "methylation protocol" is at best wishful thinking, at worst quite expensive and possibly dangerous. I think the ME/CFS forums are cesspools. And no, I don't know who Gerwyn is. And quite frankly I try as best as I can not give a flying hoot about that idiot. Or the rest of the ME/CFS freak show.

Don't Trust The Casing

I have been eating pork and fish lately, no more lamb, no more poultry and what can I say, I had a relative quiet time with regards to acne. But every now and then I got very very weak acne, and now I know why: It's those darn sausages.

And the problem seams not to be what is put inside the sausage, but rather what holds the sausages together. Because, even though the Frankfurters I ate were pork sausages, the casing was sheep. And that was not declared on the ingredient list, only "natural casing" was listed – but the manufacturer confirmed it was sheep when questioned.

Darn, one can not trust those ingredient lists.

I think all animal products from Bovidae (and possibly Ruminantia) are a problem for me. I know that beef/veal/dairy is a problem for me, and I know that lamb is a problem for me. I now know that sheep is a problem as well. I will not touch deer, moose, goat and antelope any time soon, that's for sure.

If this extents to all even-toed ungulates (and therefore Suina are not good for me as well) I will see: I plan to go on a meat-free diet, with fish being the only animal product (been holding this off for months, wanted to do this for long). Let's see where that goes.