The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [45]
Some striking information to support the link between acne and diet comes from Dr. Otto Schaefer, who spent his entire professional career in the wilderness of the Canadian Far North, working with Inuit natives who literally were transferred from the Stone Age to the Space Age in a single generation during the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Schaefer reported that in those Eskimos who ate their traditional foods, acne was absent. Only when they adopted Western foods laced with refined sugars and starches and dairy products did acne appear.
Four things happen when acne develops: First, there’s accelerated growth of the skin surrounding the hair follicle (called “follicular hyperkeratosis”). Second, oil (sebum) production speeds up within the follicle. Third, the cells in the follicle abnormally stick together as they are being shed, thus plugging the follicle. And, finally, the plugged-up follicle gets infected. Until recently, dermatologists didn’t know why the accelerated growth occurred, why these cells became excessively cohesive, or what caused the boost in oil production. But growing evidence suggests that elevated insulin and IGF-1 are directly responsible for the increased follicular skin growth, along with reductions in circulating blood levels of IGFBP-3. Remember that high-glycemic foods raise your blood level of IGF-1 while lowering IGFBP-3. This is why low-glycemic-load, high-protein diets are so effective in eliminating acne. They put the brakes on excessive follicular skin growth.
Besides causing increases in IGF-1 and reductions in IGFBP-3, elevated insulin levels from eating high-glycemic carbohydrates cause a rise in the male hormone testosterone. It is these increases in IGF-1 and testosterone that promote the discharge of oil. This means that insulin resistance caused by high-glycemic diets may be directly responsible for the first three steps in acne development. In the last five years, dietary intervention studies and a series of epidemiological studies from the Harvard School of Public Health have conclusively demonstrated that high-protein, low-glycemic diets like the Paleo Diet improve insulin metabolism and can help prevent acne. It is now safe to say that the Paleo Diet will improve your insulin metabolism—and if you have acne, this lifetime program of healthy eating will help it disappear.
As you can see, the Paleo Diet can be a very effective tool in fighting virtually all the diseases of metabolic syndrome.
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Food as Medicine: How Paleo Diets Improve Health and Well-Being
We never used to be so sick. The white man’s food is not good for us.
—Malaya Kulujuk, a Baffin Island Eskimo
The Diet-Disease Connection
Many of the chronic illnesses that plague the Western world—the “diseases of civilization”—can be attributed to dietary missteps. Diet and disease are obviously linked. And when we stray from the Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet, which stood firm for 2.5 million years, we not only develop metabolic syndrome diseases, but also increase our susceptibility to a host of other diseases.
How can we know whether a particular food, or the lack of it, in our diet is actually the factor responsible for a particular disease—or the absence of it? If you have a milk allergy or lactose intolerance, the cause and effect of your symptoms are probably painfully clear. But it’s much harder—if not impossible—to foresee whether the pat of margarine (containing trans-fatty acids) you put on your toast yesterday morning will have anything to do with causing a heart attack forty years later.
Scientists and physicians use a variety of research procedures to determine whether diet and disease are linked, including dietary interventions, epidemiological studies, animal experiments, and cultured tissue studies. When the results of all four procedures are in agreement, it is quite