“No thanks. I’ll take a Diet Coke,” is a sentence I never expected to recite so much in my adult life. No shade to Diet Coke—I love the stuff, especially after growing up in a Pepsi-dominated household—but I never thought it’d become my default drink of choice in social settings. If it wasn’t already clear, I don’t drink alcohol. The reasons for this are neither here nor there (a story for another time, my friends), but they are relevant to the topic of this week’s newsletter.
Aside from cutting out alcohol, I’m also a pescatarian. And I try hard to keep my dairy intake low. While the first two dietary restrictions are based on my own morals and ethics, the latter is mostly due to the fact that dairy isn’t all that great for skin, according to dermatologists. “For a lactating cow to give its baby what it needs to grow, that milk is going to be very high in hormones,” dermatologist S. Manjula Jegasothy, MD, previously told Allure. Some studies suggest that drinking milk is linked to acne, and one theory, as Dr. Jegasothy has explained, is that hormones mean more potential pimples. Fun!
I’d like to think I have fairly clear skin with minimal to no breakouts—thanks to access to products and treatments that prevent said acne, along with my leafy green diet. (Some studies suggest a diet rich in low-glycemic index foods, like vegetables and beans, is associated with less acne.) But when my husband busts out his homemade broccoli and cheddar cheese soup, it’s over for me.
The cystic pimples tend to appear on my chin days after my third (or fifth) bowl as a friendly reminder that dairy and I don’t really get along despite how much I wish we did. Sigh. Does this mean I have plans to cut it out of my diet completely? Absolutely not—did you not hear me say how good that soup is?—but I will make it a point to pull out the pimple patches (or schedule an appointment for a cortisol shot) for next time the cystic acne appears.
Reader Question
Is crying bad for your skin?
— asks Allure Reader Hayley