The first type of health food that can aggravate acne is the natural looking product that really is a bad product. That would include various types of chips that are coated with oil and heated to high temperature in an oven rather than a fryer, so they say they are “baked and not fried”.
The second kind of health food that can aggravate acne is part of the sugar that come from wonderful natural sources like a guava or honey because they really are sugar.
Another type of health food that can aggravate acne especially to people who have sensitivities to various types of yeast are foods like kombucha, vinegar, or apple cider vinegar. It is important to know that many of the kinds of things that might be promoted on the internet or the health food store, may not be the ones that are good for you. Your body ecosystem is unique; different foods are good for different people. Find out what’s right for you by noticing how you feel after you eat.
Let’s talk a little bit about a vegan diet and your skin from a holistic dermatology perspective. Now, a vegan diet has some wonderful aspects to it. First of all it is much more humane and many people like to subscribe to it for that reason. The second this is it avoids a lot of the various kinds of toxins that are present in meat and fish and diary products. These toxins potentially cause trouble for the skin and other parts of the body.
And also it avoids being vegan even milk which an aggravator for acne in a significant percentage of the population. So vegan diet can be a great boom to causing improvements in the health.
On the other side of it, when you go on a vegan diet, you limit tremendously your sources of protein. One way that that causes trouble is that you maybe lacking specific amino acids that are important for making complete protein. And we talked about a concept called the protein efficiency ratio.
So that means that if you are eating a whole variety of amino acids but you are lacking a few of them like, lysine and some amino acids. You are not going to make complete protein and you are not going to keeps the parts that you have assembled. You are going to get rid of those and you have to start all over again. So some diets have small amounts of meat in them that have traditionally being used in places like China, which compliment a mostly vegetarian diet.
So there are problems for some people using just a vegan diet if they are missing particular amino acids. Another problem is that if you have a diet which requires that you avoid gluten or grains you become tremendously limited in what you can eat, and so it’s very hard to get enough protein. And another aspect of a vegan diet that can be real problem is that, there are other things in foods that cause issues according to especially your blood type.
So for example if you have a lot of beans in your diet, you have certain kinds of proteins that come on those beans called lectins. Notice lectins grab onto the sugars on your red blood cells, and in many people also on your other cells. This can cause a reaction to occur inside those cells or punch holes through those cells, causing reactions that are inappropriate.
And they can be inflammatory reactions, so that they can cause leakage through membranes like the gut. So for many people a vegan diet may present an awful lot of challenges in getting enough of the right amino acids and avoiding various things are setting off inflammation. So it requires a lot of extra planning and in some cases a reconsideration of the diet in order to get rid of various diseases.
I want to talk a little bit about farmed fish and how this may be causing a variety of problems even beyond skin diseases. One of which is diabetes. Now I think you all kind of gotten the idea that sugar and simple cars are related to diabetes.
Carbs and sugars certainly are related to diabetes and in this culture we are over the top with eating sugar-related foods. I mean we eat 150 pounds of sugar per pounds per person every year. Now not everybody does that so you could imagine how much sugar some people are eating in this country to balance out the ones who aren’t be causing diabetes. But what else is causing diabetes?
Well, there have some studies done that show that chlorinated pesticides; and we are talking about Roundup and other pesticides that are very commonly used in this country can contribute to formation of diabetes. So you say well, it was a little bit in the vegetable that we eat. That’s not such a big deal, is it? Well it turns out that when we have farmed raised fish, we feed them pesticide grown food. And they concentrate those pesticides in their flesh. And there is a correlation between eating those fish and the concentration of chlorinated pesticides in individuals and the development of diabetes.
So here we have a hidden way that we are aggravating the development of diabetes in that, those inappropriate responses to insulin are contributing to skin diseases and other diseases in the body. So I want to strike a vote here for seeing what we can do to reduce the concentration of chlorinated pesticides, in not only our vegetables but in our fish and in our meats.
The benefit of an raw food diet is it avoids an awful lot of things that we have in our prepared foods that are really toxic or allergenic. Food coloring, food additives, and food preservatives and things you wouldn’t put into you food. Certainly it a whole isle full of the things with the shelf life of a year or two. Raw foods are definitely fresh and these are often delicious and healthy. Usually people who do this also eat organic foods to avoid pesticides as well.
A raw food diet can be prepared as juice or a smoothie, which breaks the food down completely and it also can be as salads and that sort of thing. The good things is it’s alkalinize it to the body. So it may well help push toxins through the body.
But I think it’s something that should only be used for a short period of time for skin diseases. From the ayruvedic standpoint, a raw food diet doesn’t make sense for skin diseases. And it’s better to have steamed and cooked vegetables because they are easier to digest, easier to extract from and that could be very helpful.
The other thing is that a raw food diet can irritate the digestive system. Because unfortunately most people in this culture eat a salad fairly quickly and don’t break everything down chewing and mixing their food with enzymes. So if you break everything down to a slurry with forty to fifty chews, that’s very different than wolfing it down with 3 or 4 or 10 bites. And so that can make you convert from being your own blender to being your own just disposal. And the disposals don’t work because large particles of food can irritate the gut on the way down and they don’t get absorbed well. So I recommend that if a raw food diet is used it’s only for a brief period of time like a few days, and then one goes into a more sustainable cooked vegetable diet.
Curious about the Paleo Diet? One of the biggest problems causing skin diseases is all the junk that we put into our bodies. We put in things that are fried, things that have chemicals, things that have been heated to high temperatures, and things that have a variety of toxins from preservatives to colorings, to pesticides.
A Paleo Diet is the idea of back to kind of a “cave man” type time, when there were limited amounts of grains available, when people were mostly eating berries and nuts and fresh leaves that were growing and in season. And also they were eating meat when that arrived at the kill, which wasn’t everyday, not in the refrigerator; and fish of course.
So the paleo diet is a conceptual way of going back to more basics. Of course if you look at the information on paleo diets, people have things that cave men would never have eaten like muffins made out of wild grains. I mean I highly doubt if they were having too much of that.
But the idea of a paleo diet is taking away all those things in modern life that could be causing trouble and going back to a basic diet which is very similar to the cave man diet which is very similar to the Mediterranean diet. Only the paleo diet would probably have almost no grains, almost no beans and of course no gluten which is a grain. So this takes away a lot of the products that were causing trouble for people in various ways.
So there is definitely some sense to that but you got to watch how people are putting that together and what they are allowing in it. Obviously the Paleo Diet is not going to work if you are vegan. I don’t think many cave men were able to avoid eating what the kill was eating even that only occurred every month. So for a lot of people, the Paleolithic Diet helps them get away from those things, and getting on to a food plan that is filled with fresh fruits and vegetable and fresh meat and fish could be a big bonus in helping their skin.
Paleo has become a real popular diet. How does it relate to natural skincare?
One good thing about a Paleo diet is that it avoids a lot of the kinds of prepared foods and chemicals that bring things into us that our bodies may not be able to deal with.
Another good thing about the Paleo diet is that it tends to be one which avoids grains as there are a number of people who are sensitive to not only gluten, but to a lesser extent whole grains. Avoiding that can be very helpful for those people.
Eating a lot of vegetables is a very healthy thing. For many people having a Paleo diet with meat and vegetables is a healthy way to go. But it’s not the only answer and for each individual there are usually specific sensitivities that also have to be addressed. If simplifying your diet by taking away many of the major aggregators makes a difference, if going Paleo takes the sugar out of your diet and makes a difference that way, you’re going to do better.
But if there are also other allergens, you need to have a closer look at that. Either watch what’s going on once you’ve gone to the Paleo diet and see what else is causing you to react or you need to go further in terms of finding out what your specific sensitivities are that are related to the problems that you’re having.
Let’s talk about the sign of too much sugar in your diet. One of them is reaction to the sugar, so you get a boost when you eat the sugar and then you crash shortly afterwards which we call reactive hypoglycemia. Another one is of course pre-diabetes. This is where various changes occurring in your body and reflected in blood test showing elevated blood sugar and also elevated sugars, bound to different molecules in the body.
Now how can you look at that? There is a test called hemoglobin A1C or glycocilated hemoglobin. Now those big words mean that the hemoglobin which is a protein has sugar that stuck on to it, and the blood cells stick around for about 3 months so this gives you a picture of what’s going on in your body over a window of time of 3 months. If there’s too much sugar over that 3 months you’re going to have more of that glycocylated hemoglobin or hemoglobin A1C.
That’s the blood test your doctor can do if they suspect that you may have sugar overload. Now, of course let’s go on other signs: cavities in the teeth can be a sign of sugar overload. Also, various kinds of reaction, after you eat sugar–craving of sugar can be a sign of repeated cycle of too much sugar, with the crash requiring more and more afterwards. And finally if you get so fat that your arm can’t reach out and touch the refrigerator door to get more that’s a sign of too much sugar.
I’ve spoken about sugar in the past and so you probably wondering what kind of sugar substitutes I would recommend. Well for people who don’t have diabetes or problems in that direction but want to cut back on their sugar and use something else as a sugar substitute or sweetener. I have another suggestion, and that is to consider using ribose. Ribose is a sugar that’s part of the molecule of information that makes up our genetic material. Ribonucleic acid and the sugar in ribonucleic acid is ribose.
Ribose seems to be a very useful product for people who have issues with the heart. It’s one of the different ingredients that can be very helpful for the heart, so it’s one thing to use on occasion. On the other side of the argument for ribose, is it’s a very sticky sugar. So for people who have problems with too much sugar and too much stickiness in their bodies and their cells and their molecules too much glycation, I would not use huge amount of ribose. But keep it in mind it’s something that supportive of the heart and also sweetens your food.
I also like stevia, monkfruit, xylitol, and in small amounts, maple syrup, or honey.
Looking for natural skincare support? Gluten has a number of different activities including as a lectin punching holes in cell membranes and enabling things to get into cells or enabling things to escape from the intestinal track that shouldn’t be escaping. Since it’s so high on the list of likely allergens, it is one of the things that can make a difference in people’s health or having various kinds of manifestations of allergic or unknown conditions.
On the other hand, going gluten-free makes it very difficult to eat in restaurants or to eat anything that you don’t prepare yourself from scratch. If you truly have a gluten sensitivity or you truly are celiac, which is a gluten sensitivity plus certain genetic markers. Then it may also be worth identifying that before you go gluten free because it’s easier to do so while you’re still eating gluten and if you really are a celiac, even a tiny, tiny bit of gluten can set you back significantly and it’s good to know that. So going gluten free is a reasonable experiment to do.
Going gluten-free may be helpful, but it may not be sufficient. Furthermore, there are a number of people who have multiple allergies. Just stopping one thing is not going to make them all better any more than if you’re sitting on three thumbtacks, removing one of them is going to solve all the pain you’re having in your bottom.
Organic Food: 3 Natural Dermatology Reasons Your Skin Wants It
Organic food is really important, and I’d like to say a bit how it fits into health and fits into treatment of skin disorders with holistic dermatology. Now if someone has been eating a lot of foods sprayed with pesticides, it’s really important to let the body get a break from that. And one way of course is to eat organic foods.
Now when we say organic foods, really that’s a technical definition in this country. The term organic allows certain kinds of pesticides to be used. And when I think of organic foods, I think of foods that are grown without pesticides or toxins at all. And that’s my favorite. So there are probably some places that have wonderful foods that are grown without pesticides that are not registered as organic, because the registration process is expensive. But they could be even better for you than the ones that have the organic label but are grown with the allowable level of pesticides. So that’s one of the questions you need to ask when you are at the farmer’s market or your grocery store.
The next thing is that there are certain foods that are heavily sprayed and apparently soak up more chemicals than other foods, and those are the ones to definitely choose organic. Leafy vegetables, celery, strawberries and just a few of those. Find places to shop for your fruits and vegetables where you can learn what sorts of chemicals are being used. Because if you can wash the off with soap and water or a food detergent (found in your local health food store), that may be acceptable.
So using organic food can be beneficial because it avoids toxins. And some of those toxins inhibit the process the body does to suppress allergic reactions. So avoiding toxic foods and eating organic foods can help reduce allergic reactions. But personally I sometimes choose to use the regular, non-organic foods if they are not known to be heavy in pesticides. And I also choose locally grown foods that come from farmers who don’t use pesticides who are not necessarily organic, as mentioned above.
Of course organic can also mean using foods that have been given natural fertilizers, which again is another important thing to make the foods more healthy. And finally, interestingly enough, foods that are grown organically have more stresses on them, so that the plant has to make its own pesticides. And some of those pesticides are called cell versants. And those products that the plants make have anti-cancer properties. So, there maybe additional benefits in those “stressed” organic plants or pesticide-free plant that cause them to make products within them that will protect you much further.
So another vote for organic food from the holistic dermatology perspective. To your health!
