One of the most common genetic diseases in the world is acne. Acne is a common skin condition that results in cystic lesions, whiteheads, blackheads, and pimples. Despite acne being a genetic skin issue, it’s something we can not avoid.
In this post, we want to help you to get in the direction of clear skin and set great lifestyle habits. With these steps, you will understand what causes acne and how to get rid of acne with a holistic approach. These are the five steps that we should take,
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- Understanding Triggers
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- How to Read Food Labels
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- How To Read Supplement Labels
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- Having A Personal Treatment Plan
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- Knowing Pore Clogging Ingredients
Acne results from the accumulation of dead skin cells in our pores. The triggers worsen the situation by causing an apparent breakout and causing physiological inflammation so understanding triggers are significant.
There are so many misconceptions about which food is acne-triggering. What has proven to be acne triggering in regard to food is iodine or salt. Various foods are acne-triggering but we don’t have to eliminate every food and restrain ourselves.
When it comes to treating acne, some supplements, vitamins, minerals, and herbs can be very effective. The appropriate supplements can be hard to choose. Regarding that, some of the most well-known vitamins are unhealthy for our health and can worsen acne.
Moreover, even though pore cloggers do not cause acne, if you’re already acne-prone, it will aggravate your acne because acne is already growing beneath the skin. So, it’s really important to learn pore-clogging ingredients and to not ever put anything on your skin or your hair without checking the ingredients first.
What is Acne?
Acne is a condition or process that causes the skin to go through is called Retention Hyperkeratosis. This process makes the skin cell turnover five times faster, which starts to clog pores by triggers like gut, stress, hormones, and diet. Then forms a micro-comedones and becomes a blemish after 90 days.
Here’s a quick overview of our 7-Day Challenge. With this challenge, you will understand what causes acne and how to get rid of acne with a holistic approach.
This challenge is to get you started in getting clear skin and learning how to build lifestyle habits that will help you get clear and stay clear forever. The first step is to find your trigger. Here’s our Acne Causes Quiz to help you with that.
Take Your Acne Causes Quiz.
1. Understanding Your Triggers
There are Four Primary Acne Triggers
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- Stress
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- Hormones
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- Gut Imbalance
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- Foods/Supplements.
It’s critical to keep in mind that acne is a genetic condition. Therefore, the buildup of dead skin cells in our pores leads to acne. The triggers make matters worse by creating bodily inflammation that results in a noticeable breakout.
If hormones were your primary acne trigger, you’re not alone. Hormone fluctuations don’t just occur during puberty but throughout life. Acne is associated with elevated levels of testosterone and lower levels of estrogen.
Stress is another common trigger for acne. The adrenal glands produce extra androgen hormones, which is stimulating the sebaceous glands beneath the skin to increase oil production and this triggers the pre-acne to flare to the surface, causing an inflamed breakout.
Gut health has a direct correlation to the health of our skin. Our blood is what nourishes our skin and is where our hormones are carried. We don’t want toxins seeping back into the mix after cleaning out our bowels.
Of course, diet is another piece of the puzzle- This might have been your primary trigger. So, We’re sure you’ve probably heard that foods that trigger acne are sugar, chocolate, gluten, and greasy food- but in reality, these are not true acne-triggering foods. We’ll dive into this in the next section.
2. How To Read Food Labels
You may read on blogs that sweets, chocolate, fast food, french fries, and other similar foods cause acne. However, this is only partially correct.
When we are talking about true acne triggers in foods- there are three things, Iodine, B7- Biotin, and B12.
Iodine is an essential nutrient, we do need it in our diet but iodine is a big problem for acne-prone skin. Places to find iodized salt are traditional table salt, prepared, packaged, frozen foods- basically anything that you are grabbing off the shelves of the grocery store- soups, pasta sauce, condiments, frozen pizza, chips, cow’s milk dairy, etc.
While the approach to food triggers is pretty straightforward, it can be tricky to identify which foods your body is responding to and eliminate them.
Handout to help you identify what acne-triggering foods you might be consuming regularly: LINK
3. How To Read Supplement Labels
There’s a misconception that all-natural supplements are good, but they are not all good for acne. As we discussed, most of the supplements have iodine, B7, and B12.
B7 (Biotin): Hair, skin, and nail supplements, should have a big old warning label on them because they are all acne triggering. They have biotin, which increases cell turnover, which is great if you want your fingernails to grow fast or hair to grow longer and quicker. However, we do not need to increase cell turnover when we have acne.
Iodine: Iodine is one of the nutrients that’s added to multivitamins. Iodine added to supplements, any kind of specific ingredients like blue-green algae, spirulina, chlorella, kelp, all of those things are not iodine specifically, but they’re very high in iodine.
B12: Naturally found in animal and dairy products. It’s essential to the body. An excess of B12 has been shown to disrupt the skin bacteria known as Propionibacterium acnes.
These nutrients are not only found in pills but also in protein shakes/bars, energy drinks, and/or non-dairy products…
