How “Healthy Food” Can Aggravate Your Acne and How It Is Best Treated In Functional Medicine

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 food that can aggravate acne is part of the sugar that comes 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 at 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.

Skincare is an inside job. Any beauty routine starts with good nutrition and lifestyle practices, and addressing underlying health issues. It involves healing the gut with dietary changes, sleep, exercise, stress management, supplements, hormonal balance and focused elimination of environmental toxins.

Going beyond the basic testing that a primary care provider or even dermatologist do will assess the drivers of skin inflammation. There are a few tests we recommend if you’re suffering from skin problems:

1. Intestinal permeability: Leaky gut, a condition in which the tight junctions in your intestinal lining break apart. The ‘leaks’ cause harmful substances to enter your bloodstream, leading to inflammation that can cause as well as aggravate skin conditions like rosacea and eczema.
2. Hormone testing: Imbalances in hormones like cortisol, testosterone, DHEA-S and estrogen could be a major contributor to skin conditions. Overproduction of testosterone, for example, can trigger oil production on the skin which leads to acne.
3. Metabolism and blood sugar: Fasting insulin and hemoglobin A1C are useful tests for assessing if blood sugar imbalances lead to poor metabolic management and skin problems.
4. Food allergies and sensitivities can be triggers for skin issues. In fact, people with celiac disease, or an intolerance to gluten, are three times more likely to have eczema.
5. Environment toxicity profile and hair mineral analysis can detect the presence of mercury, aluminum, lead, copper etc. in the body which leads to skin flare-ups.
6. Microbiome assessment for fungal overgrowth, i.e. different forms of yeast, and imbalances in bacteria that studies show, can lead to conditions like acne and eczema.

Using functional medicine protocols, we get to the ‘why’ of the matter or the ‘root cause’ of your skin problems. Once we know the root cause, we can then form a patient-centric personalized skin-care regimen, that will be a permanent cure and not a symptomatic treatment.

Kate Gassaway, RN, MSN, APRN-BC Nurse Practitioner and Founder of Solutions Medical Center