subject: How To Cure Acne [print this page] Becoming acne free is easyBecoming acne free is easy. It is just a matter of understanding how diet and acne are related.
Acne is primarily caused by excessive peaks in your insulin. Excessive peaks in your insulin cause the conversion of testosterone into dihydroxytestosterone (DHT). DHT then stimulates the sebaceous glands (oil glands) in your skin to produce excessive oil.
The excessive oil quickly blocks the gland and the delicate dermal layer around the gland becomes ruptured. The ruptured skin then becomes infected. Bacteria that normally live harmlessly inside the oil gland invade the ruptured skin.
The body then registers an infection and your immune system sends thousands of white blood cells to the area of the infection. It is these blood cells that are the puss of a "whitehead" or the cause of the painful swelling of a deep cystic acne.
So how do you cure acne? The answer lies in your diet. The answer lies in understanding how diet influences the level of insulin in your body.
Most people do not consider the effect food has on their bodies, beyond whether that food is "healthy" or "makes you fat." When it comes to acne, understanding how certain foods affect the level of insulin in your body is essential.
Some foods cause a massive peak in insulin, while other foods cause a relatively small rise in insulin. But what is insulin anyway? Insulin is a hormone. Hormones regulate just about everything in our bodies, from how we grow to how we function minute to minute and day to day.
And insulin is perhaps the most fundamental of all the hormones of our body, as it plays a role in many, many bodily functions. One of the roles insulin plays is its role in regulating blood sugar levels. When you eat, there is a rise in your insulin as your blood sugar increases. The body only requires a certain level of blood sugar at any one time.
Any excess sugar in the blood stream is converted into fat. And insulin plays a major role in converting sugar to fat. Obviously, the more sugar in the food you eat, the higher the rise in insulin.
Take for example if you were to eat a spoonful of sugar. That sugar is already in the form the body requires for it to enter the blood stream. So, upon digestion, that sugar is rapidly absorbed by the body. Subsequently there is a rapid rise in your insulin.
But say if you were eat a spoonful of granulated nuts. The spoonful of nuts is essentially a spoonful of protein that contains very little sugar. But the important thing to understand is that the spoonful of nuts may contain the same amount of energy as the spoonful of sugar, but the energy of the nuts is in the form of protein.
The protein you eat eventually does become blood sugar, but protein must first be converted by the body into sugar. This conversion of protein to sugar is significantly slower than the rapid uptake of sugar into the blood stream in the instance of eating raw sugar.
Therefore, by consuming protein instead of sugar, you are ensuring that there is no rapid rise - to the point of extreme - in the level of insulin in your body. But here's the amazing point: If you are an average modern human being who consumes the average western diet, your body has become more resistant to insulin than what it should. Why? Because the modern diet is unhealthily high in sugar and other high glycemic foods.
The result of this is when you consume your regular meal, your body requires more insulin (to deal with the intake of sugar) than what it should. Thus there is an even higher level of insulin in your body. And the high insulin results in a significantly greater incidence of acne.
The trick to beating acne is understanding the effect certain foods have on your insulin. In other words, eliminating acne is all about managing your insulin levels.
