Chocolate

Chocolate or fried foods cause acne

Those of us with acne will try almost anything to improve our skin. Everyone wants clear skin. When you have pimples popping up all over, your parents and other well-meaning people often tell you to avoid chocolate or fried foods because these foods make acne worse. Many acne sufferers swear that they see differences in how bad their acne is based on what they eat. Whether or not your diet will sabotage your efforts to have clear skin is a question addressed by some interesting science.

Studies show us that people around the world believe that there is some link between acne and what they eat. The belief that particular foods make acne worse has been reported in studies of acne sufferers and their families from countries ranging from Greece to Britain to Jordan. Greasy food is most often reported as a cause of acne, perhaps reflecting beliefs that greasy skin and eating greasy food are linked. Nonmedical people are not the only ones who are not sure what makes acne better or worse; medical students, nurses, and family practice doctors have also been shown to have very limited knowledge about what worsens acne and what works to treat it.

The science about acne and what we eat is actually rather tricky to sort through. A number of studies have looked at how many people suffer from acne in different parts of the world. These studies find that acne is more common among adolescents in places like the United States and Canada than it is in certain parts of Africa or in other isolated places, like Papua New Guinea or among certain groups in Paraguay or Brazil. The low rates of acne in places where people are eating very different foods than we do in America make scientists wonder whether your diet really does make a difference for your acne. People in America and Canada do eat more chocolate and more fried, greasy foods than people in these other places. The problem with these studies is that other factors could also be making a difference in the rates of acne. Certain ethnic groups might just be less prone to developing acne. Or other factors related to the environment or skin care practices might play a role. The studies of how common acne is in certain places do not actually tell us that foods are to blame, and they definitely don’t tell us which foods might be to blame.

To try to find out whether certain foods are to blame, other scientists have tried to look more specifically at what people eat and whether they have acne. (Rachel really just cares about chocolate, so that is the one we will look at most carefully.) Chocolate, fried or greasy foods, and foods with a lot of sugar are often blamed for causing acne or for making your breakouts worse. We have often heard this debunked as a myth, but it took some research to look at all the evidence. Scientists have often tested these foods in regard to acne by testing whether the foods increase insulin resistance. Insulin is a particular hormone that helps the body absorb sugars, but it is also involved in a sequence of hormone responses in your body that has been linked to how we develop acne. Your body’s reaction to insulin can actually impact the other hormones, like androgens and retinoids, that are more directly linked to developing acne. Scientists have speculated that foods that make you more resistant to insulin might also give you more acne by increasing these other hormones. While studies of animals have almost always shown that foods with lots of fats (like chocolate or fried foods) increase the body’s resistance to insulin, many of the studies in humans have not found such a link between eating a lot of fat and having more insulin resistance. There is also no evidence that eating a lot of sugar (or having high glycemic indexes) makes humans have too much insulin or makes them resistant to insulin in ways that would cause acne. Whether or not eating a lot of fat or sugar changes the body’s resistance to insulin has important implications for problems like diabetes and obesity. Scientists need to do more work to figure out whether or how these foods impact the body’s long-term response to insulin. In the meantime, there is not definitive evidence that high-fat or high-sugar foods will increase insulin resistance in a way that causes you to have more acne.

The other hypothesis that scientists have tested is whether foods with more fat or sugar might increase how much sebum comes out of your pores. Sebum is basically what makes your skin oily, the natural oil of the skin. It is trapped sebum in the pores of your skin that gets inflamed and causes acne. Do fatty foods increase how much sebum you are making? Once again, some of the studies in animals show that animals do make more sebum when they eat more fat. In human studies, there is some suggestion that what you eat might change the amount of sebum your skin makes and how much fat is in that sebum. However, the human studies do not show that this change in the sebum impacts your acne.

Two studies have specifically tested whether chocolate impacts acne in humans. The studies did not have huge numbers of volunteers and were not designed as well as we would have liked, but both studies did not show any connection between chocolate and acne. In one of the studies, volunteers were given either chocolate bars or a fake chocolate bar that had similar amounts of fat and sugar. Those who were given the actual chocolate bars did not have any more acne, did not make any more sebum (skin oil), and did not have any changes in the composition of their sebum when they were compared to those eating the placebo bars. Several other small studies that asked people about their diets and about their acne found no connection between having acne and how much sugar they eat, how much chocolate they eat, shellfish, sweets, pizza, French fries, or other fatty foods.

A number of people have also questioned whether milk was to blame for acne breakouts. Because most chocolate contains milk, if milk is to blame for acne problems, this could also implicate chocolate. In several small studies, researchers have not found any connection between how much milk or other dairy products people eat and whether they have more acne. However, in a big study of thousands of nurses, there was an association between those who reported a history of having acne as a teenager and those who reported drinking more milk as a teenager. Scientists have come up with lots of theories as to why milk might cause more acne. In particular, they have speculated that hormones or other substances like iodine in the milk might make adolescents’ acne worse. These theories sound like they might make sense, but they haven’t been proven. And even the big study that connected milk intake and acne has some serious flaws. First of all, this kind of connection is an association, not causation. There is no proof that the milk causes the acne; the linkage can only say that they are correlated. Second, the data in the study relies on people’s memories of what they ate or drank. In comes the potential problem of recall bias that we have talked about before. It is very possible that if you had a problem like acne and you thought that milk might be involved, you would remember your milk-drinking more clearly than people who never had issues with acne.

Even though people all around the world believe that their diet affects their acne, there is no good scientific evidence that this is the case. Experts have developed ideas about how certain foods might make acne worse, but the scientific tests of these ideas let the foods off the hook! Both chocolate and fatty foods have been studied, and are not linked to acne. As is often the case, though, it would be great to have bigger and better studies to try to help us understand what really does make pimples pop up. In summary, there is no good scientific evidence to suggest that chocolate or fried foods are to blame for making your acne worse. A healthy diet should only include chocolate or fried foods in moderation; you can certainly enjoy these treats occasionally without pimple paranoia.