9. Peanut-powered Breakouts and the Bittersweet Story of Chocolate

Today we're talking about peanut-powered breakouts and the bittersweet story of chocolate.

So peanut-powered breakouts, let's start there. Peanuts are nutritious, but they are not good for my acne patients. Even peanuts or peanut butter or peanut oils, for some reason peanuts contain some chemicals that mimic the androgens, which are male-class hormones, in terms of being able to bind to the androgen receptors on the oil glands within our skin. That makes the oil glands pump out more oil. You may notice if you go on a peanut binge or peanut butter binge, you can really see many patients have a susceptibility to flare up their acne from eating peanuts or peanut butter.

Next let's talk about the bittersweet story of chocolate. We talk about chocolate and acne, and it's been in many different professional journals, in layperson's articles and magazine, about chocolate and acne. But I'm here to tell you it's not the cocoa powder within the chocolate that worsens the acne, it's the sugar and the milk that's been added to the chocolate; milk chocolate, for example. We talked about in our last espidode the mystery of milk, we talked all about why milk is inflammatory and can worsen acne.

In today's episode I want to tell you why the sugar in the chocolate can worsen acne. We talked a little bit about that already, back in episode seven, which is Acne, Sugar and Sweets. The sugar really can spike the level of insulin, and the insulin's receptor on the oil gland can help the oil gland pump out more oil, which we don't need down in the pores, which can clog up the pores and contribute to the acne. So it's not the cocoa powder itself, it's the sugar and the milk that's often in milk chocolate that really will flare up the acne. So that's peanut-powered breakouts, and that's the bittersweet story of chocolate. You can use chocolate, just don't use milk chocolate and use unsweetened cocoa powder in your cooking, and maybe another type of sweetener instead of the sugar if you're doing your own baking.

I'm Doctor Jacob, we'll see you next time.