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Adult Acne Blog - 2003
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nurse, nutritionist, herbalist, or otherwise medically trained person.
I am an ordinary person who has suffered from adult acne since 1995 and have found no solution to my acne through conventional medicine.
April 3, 2003
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
5:54 AM (Pacific)
Well, the usual...anything connected with acne tends to be horribly confusing, horribly expensive...and mostly, horribly depressing.
That's just the bad part. :)
I don't know what to tell you. The more I learn about these vitamin supplements, the less I know...I can say that some of it is helping my skin. It is definitely doing that. The stuff works better than any topical, prescription or OTC.
But what I'd like, is a conclusive report on what to take...and I don't have that yet.
It is confusing, that's for sure. I went to the Whole Foods in Berkeley...there were *3 aisles* (it's a supermarket) worth of supplements. They had taken out all the jewelry (*ppppppppppphhhhhht*), decimated the cosmetics (*phhhhhhhhhhhhtttt*), basically destroyed 3 aisles of the store, to stuff those aisles with the lucrative pills.
I've also been reading an old Rodale book...most of what they're saying makes sense, but how practical it is...? The Rodale book says that you shouldn't take "isolated" vitamins, that they're meant to work together. That makes sense. They also say that "artificial" vitamins are bad and natural ones are good. Okay, but...? I understand it but I don't have a million dollars to spend on natural vitamins, and I don't want to pop a hundred pills a day.
Anyhow...I'm currently taking a TwinLab daily capsule called Daily One Caps. There's an iron version and a non-iron version. I started taking it yesterday.
I went a few days taking something called Rainbow Light Hair, Nails, & Skin Connection. It's supposedly "food-based"--and that's a trademark, "food-based"--how can it be trademarked? What the hell does it mean? I went on the Net to find out but of course, the first bazillion results you pull up are just advertising for vitamins. Anyway--I didn't like it. I tried it by itself, two tablets per day, and broke out. I combined one tablet with one of my Stress-B's and got a lovely "niacin flush" or whatever it is...your face turns kind of red for a few hours. I put this one aside.
Back to the Rodale book...the part that makes the most sense to me is about combining vitamins. I'll have to do more research...I can see this is going to be tedious, because I'm sifting through monumental advertising...on what is natural and what isn't and if there is really a difference.
But it does explain why the brewer's yeast works. The Rodale theory is that if you refine the vitamins out of something, you're not getting all the other stuff...possibly microscopic amounts...that came with the vitamins.
The example they gave was...seawater. Someone tried to create seawater in a laboratory. Of course it is easy to duplicate whatever the components of seawater are, right? Well, a fish placed in this lab-created seawater, immediately died.
They repeated this experiment several times, each time creating the seawater more carefully, and each time the fish died.
Someone got the bright idea of putting a small amount of real seawater in with the fake, and, the fish lived. The theory is that the natural product contains substances so small they cannot be measured.
I'm speculating now, if taking a small amount of brewer's yeast on top of the "artificial" vitamin pill I'm taking, would do it. By small amount I mean a brewer's yeast pill.
About the TwinLab pill...my skin (I'm writing this the next day after taking 1 pill), is noticeably less oily. I can say that. It actually looks pretty good. It's way too soon to say. It is so hard doing this. I think it's the vitamin A that reduces oiliness.
I am committed to trying this pill for one week. The next time I go to the store, I'll look for a brewer's yeast tablet, I didn't see one last time I went...but that's the only other variable I want to add right now.
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