Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagle and you're listening to the

nutrition diva quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous lots of

you have emailed and phoned with questions about diet and acne, so today

we're going to talk about whether what you eat can make a difference in your complexion.

There are a lot of old wives tales about how certain foods can cause acne, such as chocolate,

potato chips, or pizza.

Conventional dermatologists, on the other hand, are more likely to tell you that there

is no link at all between diet and acne. I think the truth is probably

somewhere in between. There's some new evidence that certain foods may be linked to acne, but it

looks as if we've been focusing on the wrong foods.

It turns out that chocolate and oily foods

don't seem to affect acne, but refined carbohydrates

and dairy products just might.

The evidence against dairy is chiefly based on epidemiological studies.

That means that when we look at big groups of people and what they eat, there seems to be

a correlation between dairy and acne. Specifically, we see that people who eat less dairy seem to have less trouble with acne.

Now in nutrition, this is the equivalent of a smoking gun.

It doesn't definitively prove anything, but it gives you an idea where to look for the bullet.

The next step would be a controlled trial.

For example, we could take a big group of people that have acne and have them stop eating dairy but keep everything else

exactly the same and then we'd see if it made a big enough difference in their

symptoms that we could be sure that it wasn't due to chance or to placebo effect.

...