When you’re a teenager, nothing much bothers you more than a bad case of acne. It’s like everything in your life feels smaller: you feel inferior and ugly and, because of that, become shy and subdued, without confidence or conviction – the kind of small personality that people often misinterpret or, worse, ignore altogether. Thankfully for most of us, acne ends with puberty and we begin to hit our stride pimple-free. But sometimes, acne comes back. How is your skin looking these days?

Acne haunts us even if we’ve done all the right things: paid attention to proper skin care and took the pimple-removing medications religiously and in the right doses. And yet, the acne has remained. Perhaps there is something that we have overlooked? In many cases, that thing is proper nutrition and diet to discourage acne.

A healthy diet improves our overall well-being and gives us more resistance to sickness and disease. Poor diets have the opposite effect and it sometimes shows on our face. Dermatologists often counsel acne sufferers from eating foods with high iodine content while some believe that huge doses of refined sugar can exacerbate acne. The exception to this rule is seafood. It contains iodine but not enough to cause an acne breakout.

Wikipedia recently reported on the results of a survey involving 47,335 women that proved that there was a link between milk consumption and acne, especially skimmed milk.

Contrary to what many people believe, there is no scientific study that proves that consuming a reduced amount of soft drinks, sweets and white bread (high-glycemic foods) will alleviate acne. Even my long-held persona belief about chocolate, french fries, potato chips and other fastfoods as some of the bigger culprits of acne has come under fire of late in scientific circles.

Foods with high nutritional value are great for keeping your skin clear, including fruits, vegetables, organic products, non-processed items, pure juices and water.

In the final analysis, most nutritionists and health professionals counsel acne sufferers to try different things and experiment with their diets, and if they find anything that causes or worsens acne, then make it a point to avoid such foods.