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Wellness Wednesday for August 9, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Wow, I haven't absorbed all of this yet but I first wanted to say thanks for writing it up and taking my problem seriously, it's very comprehensive. I've actually been wondering prior to this discussion about the different-fat-types explanation because it seems to fit with dairy being largely OK and non-beef proteins not. It also fits with the fact that this was a permanent fixture of my life until I tried a radical diet because of the high prevalence of soybean oil and other similar oils in American food. Even then, though, I have noticed other triggers, like adding flour to the beef roasts I make as a thickener, so I think gluten may be a problem too, but I may have to try again to confirm since that was a while ago.

I fear there may be no solution though, even if it's possible to ultimately identify what is causing the problem, which would leave me in the possession of a permanently broken digestive system requiring the long-term consumption of a dubiously healthy diet if I don't want to look terrible all the time, and that scares me a lot...

I second the suggestion below to ask a dermatologist if this is actually rosacea rather than acne. Rosacea is much better known to respond to dietary triggers, including a class I forgot to mention, 'spicy' stuff -- substances that hit the TRP channels (which can include stuff that's not so obviously spicy -- even broccoli contains some AITC, which hits the TRPA1 channel, for instance -- AITC : wasabi :: capsaicin : chili peppers, and AITC : TRPA1 :: capsaicin : TRPV1).

Also rosacea may be related to the 'niacin flush', which different people have different thresholds for experiencing, and salmon is notably high in niacin. If you can get some niacin -- not niacinamide, which doesn't produce the flush -- you might be able to see if your threshold for this is unusually low.