Hormones and Acne - How Are They Related?

The connection between hormones and acne goes a lot deeper than you may think. In fact, I believe understanding and controlling hormone irregularities is the key to getting clear. The problem lies in the fact that hormone irregularities can come from many different sources.

If you can understand both hormones and acne then you are well on your way to becoming clear.

What Are Hormones?

Hormones are basically the communication system used by the cells in your body. They are chemicals that cells produce in order to send messages to other cells.

Not all cells will respond to these hormone produced "messages". Cells have to have a specific kind of receptor for that particular hormone in order for the hormone "message" to have any effect.

Please understand that even though I may paint hormones in a bad light throughout this web site, they are critical to many of the processes inside your body.

So how are hormones and acne related?

The Acne Equation

The following acne equation is my own simplified overview or point of reference for looking at how hormones and acne are linked:

The genetic tendencies part of the equation explains why not everyone who has hormone problems will develop acne. For example, the sebaceous glands which control sebum (oil) production in your pores might be more sensitive to hormone "messaging" than someone who does not have acne. Everyone is wired a little differently and hormone issues can show up in many different ways.

If you have acne, treat this as a good thing. It is a warning sign produced by your body. Your body is telling you something is wrong on the inside, and you need to fix it.

If you don't fix the cause, you will likely continue to get acne and may experience many other more serious health problems in the future.

According to the equation, there is a very close link between hormones and acne. Take a look at some of the causes of hormone irregularities I have listed below to see what might match up with your own situation.

Blood Sugar Problems/Insulin Resistance

If your body has problems regulating its blood sugar, or if you make it especially hard for your body to keep your glucose levels normal by making poor food choices, you can develop acne. I think the latter happens to most people with acne and they don't even realize it.

When your blood sugar levels spike (say after eating a piece of cake), the pancreas releases insulin into the bloodstream to counteract the spike. Insulin is a hormone and is a precursor to many other hormones like IGF-1 (Insulin-like Growth Factor) and IGFBP-3 (Insulin-like Growth Factor Binding Protein) . If the spike was very severe the pancreas can overreact and cause a blood sugar crash. To counteract that, androgens are released to try and normalize the blood sugar level again.

Graph of Blood Sugar Levels After Eating

Insulin, IGF-1, and IGFBP-3 are all hormones which can initiate the development of acne in your body. These are acne causing hormones because they:

• trigger oil production in your sebaceous glands
• increase skin cell regeneration (this sounds like a good thing but can cause too many skin cells to get stuck in a pore)
• causes clumps of dead skin cells to be shed instead of one by one

Eating too many foods with a high glycemic load, which cause blood sugar spikes, can also cause your body to become insulin resistant. It's like the cells get tired of seeing the insulin, and so they don't respond to it as well in order to effectively regulate blood sugar. That means more insulin needs to be pumped through your blood in order to get a response from the cells, which means more hormones too! :(

Having too much fat or eating too many calories can also cause insulin resistance. That's because the insulin gets blocked when trying to take the glucose out of the blood - there's too much fat in the way.

Insulin levels are not only a concern to diabetics. They're a very important marker for health - and acne is a very visible sign of this.

When I became more consciously aware of my insulin and blood sugar, I took steps to improve my diet. This step was the catalyst which finally got me on the right track towards clearing my skin.

What really did it for me was the large body of scientific evidence that links insulin resistance and acne. If you like to verify multiple sources before trusting an opinion, just like me, I recommend you do a search in Google Scholar.

Nutritional Deficiencies

Eating too many processed foods that have very little nutritional value can lead to acne. This is because they are foods which lack essential vitamins, minerals, and enzymes, yet are filled with toxins which can create an imbalance in your body. Therefore after eating processed foods your body's cells, tissues, and organs won't be capable of working at their peak efficiency and effectiveness.

If that's the case, then you are making your body more vulnerable to various bacteria, viruses, etc. Your body's immune system will be weakened by the lack of proper nutrition and will also be busier than normal dealing with all the "intruders".

Just how unhealthy your body gets depends on many different factors. However, I think it's safe to say that the more deficient you are, the more problems your body will develop. For example, if you are deficient in essential fatty acids, the production of prostaglandins is reduced. This makes your body less capable of regulating your hormones and acne could develop as a result.

Your skin is an organ, which is made up tissues and cells just like any other. Without the right nutrients your skin will not be as healthy, making it more susceptible to breakouts. The skin may not have all the building blocks it needs to regenerate, heal, and defend your body.

This can cause excess inflammation in your pimples, can slow down the healing time, and make you more vulnerable to newly clogged pores.

If your skin is deficient it may not respond to even the smallest hormone irregularities as well as it should. If part of your body is out of balance, it's like a chain reaction that affects the rest of your body.

A very simple example of this in action is your teeth. Only one of my adult teeth came in in a bad position, but it then caused all of the surrounding teeth in both my upper and lower jaws to shift in order to compensate for the misplacement. This resulted in crooked teeth and cross-bites throughout my mouth. Only because of one bad tooth! I know many others have experienced something similar as well.

Now there isn't a direct link connecting nutrient deficiency to hormones and acne in scientific literature, but there are papers here and there that seem to hint at the possibility. There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence where acne sufferer X took vitamin Y and their acne disappeared. It's up to you to connect the dots in order to convince yourself.

For example, it's now commonly accepted that taking a zinc supplement helps your acne. How does it do this? By helping to your body regulate its hormones! Hmm... :)

From a holistic perspective, all of what I have said makes complete sense. If you trust this way of thinking then you probably had little difficulty believing this. I find treating health holistically can get you further because it can fill the gaps of our current scientific knowledge.

Chronic, Low Intensity Inflammation

Many people suffer from a chronic form of low intensity inflammation. This isn't like the acute inflammation you may experience from an infected cut or pimple. But, it does keep your body at an elevated alert level.

This means that when you do end up getting a blocked pore, it becomes even more inflamed than it needs to be. This chronic form of low intensity inflammation causes excess redness in the area surrounding the acne. In addition, the weakened immune system allows more p. acnes bacteria to grow which makes a pimple even worse.

I myself suffered from quite a bit of excess inflammation. Inflammatory events have even been linked to the earliest stages of a zit being created [Best Practice & Research Clinical Rheumatology, Volume 20, Issue 5, Pages 829-848 F. Luyten, R. Lories, P. Verschueren, K. de Vlam, R. Westhovens]. That is a bit of a paradigm shift because most topical treatment options try to kill the alleged "acne causing" bacteria, p. acnes.

But as I've been trying to show you, hormones and acne are related far more than the minor role bacteria play.

Prostaglandins

So how do you relate hormones and acne to inflammation?

Well at a very high level you could say that inflammation contributes to the problem of hormone irregularities, and vice versa. One of the factors that we know about is our good friend, the prostaglandin.

The prostaglandin is a hormone that regulates inflammation, other hormones, and cell growth!

Not all prostaglandins are made the same however. Some are more pro-inflammatory, and some are anti-inflammatory. Some are better at regulating hormones and cell growth than others. Whether they are "good" or "bad" depends on how they were built - and one of their major building blocks are fats.

If you eat enough good fats, such as Omega 3's, you will build more "good" prostaglandins that will help regulate hormones more efficiently and also reduce chronic inflammation. Simply consuming more Omega 3 fatty acids could potentially solve your imbalanced hormones and acne problem, barring other factors of course.

Leaky Gut Syndrome

With enough inflammation you can get a condition called leaky gut syndrome. What happens is the spacing of cells in your intestinal lining widens, which allows incompletely digested food, hormones, and toxins to recirculate back into the bloodstream.

This further increases inflammation in the body and is linked to many disorders - and that includes acne.

Inflammatory Foods

There are foods that tend to be either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. Getting into the reasons why is beyond the scope of this article, but a very big example worth mentioning is food allergies.

You might not realize you have a food allergy, as it doesn't necessarily have to be very acute or obvious. I believe to some extent we are all mildy allergic to gluten for example, because our bodies have trouble digesting it. It wasn't until the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago where we started consuming grains with gluten, so you could imagine that there might be some evolutionary incompatibilities between our digestive system and grains.

In general, focusing on eating anti-inflammatory foods will help keep your hormones and acne in check.

Lack of Sleep

It's been shown that by consistently not getting enough sleep, your body produces extra cytokines. Cytokines are molecules that trigger an inflammatory response in your body. So sleep deprivation means more chronic inflammation!

Toxic Buildup

We're all exposed to toxins. They have been building up in your bodies all your life. Fortunately your body has many mechanisms to get rid of toxins, such as the liver, bowels, kidneys, and skin.

Your liver is the primary tool used by your body for toxin elimination. The problem is that for many people, it is overloaded. With all the toxins of modern society, such as those found in:

• Skin care products we apply
• Household cleaning products we use
• Non-organic foods we eat
• Polluted air we breathe
• Non-filtered water we drink

your liver can't keep up!

This causes a chain reaction of problems that ends up weakening your immune system, creating inflammation, messing up your balance of hormones and acne ends up surfacing.

Since your liver is overloaded, the hormones can't be deactivated by the liver and so they end up recirculating through your body. This can cause... you guessed it... hormone imbalance. The various receptors throughout your body, such as your sebaceous glands, get triggered all over again.

As if it weren't bad enough, some theories suggest that the skin is then used for the elimination of the excess toxins which then clog pores and creates a better breeding ground for the p. acnes bacteria. Your white blood cells and the bacteria end up fighting it out, which is then seen as the white pus and red inflammation on your acne.

(Oh and by the way, if your skin doesn't get red it doesn't necessarily mean the skin isn't inflamed, it's just less inflamed.)

This is why you might have heard of liver flushes and detoxes being recommended as an acne treatment. If you improve the capability of the liver to perform its duty you will balance your hormones and acne will not develop - barring other factors from drastically affecting your hormones of course. :)

Stress

When your body is stressed, it releases a hormone called cortisol. This contributes to the overall hormonal imbalance in your body and puts an extra load on your liver (as if it wasn't burdened enough already!)

Cortisol amplifies the effects of other hormones which can create even more hormonal imbalance and blood sugar swings. This quality makes cortisol the main reason why stress is so bad.

Most of us in the modern world live in a very stressful environment. Stress can be useful for survival and performance, but too much of it can be detrimental to the body. It simply isn't natural, so our bodies have to adjust to cope.

It is my opinion that all of us should take an extra effort to reduce stress each and every day, to try and make up for the extra stress we put on our bodies throughout the day. This can be done through exercise, meditation, deep breathing, etc.

Caffeine and other stimulants such as alcohol also stress our body. Now, I'm by no means at the point where I've eliminated them from my diet - but I have significantly reduced the intake of each. Coffee has been replaced with green tea and alcohol is only minimally consumed socially.

Every little bit counts when it comes to your hormones and acne, and I've seen positive results from taking steps to reduce stress.

Acne as a Teenager

Hormones and acne seem to go hand-in-hand as a teenager. Why is this?

Puberty increases insulin resistance naturally to allow for a surge of extra hormones to go through your body to help your body change. Because of that, you are more susceptible to hormone imbalances by the other contributing factors listed above. The connection between hormones and acne couldn't be made any more evident than this.

That is why you see acne predominantly in teenagers in the modern world, and why it goes away after puberty for most people. Their insulin resistance and hormone levels go back to "normal", and the rest of their lifestyle factors don't add up to more acne.

But for some people, the acne doesn't go away. Puberty finishes and its influence is no longer present, but the hormone irregularities remain. Their genetic tendencies and lifestyle cause imbalanced hormones and acne.

Adult Onset Acne

For adult onset acne, the link between hormones and acne rears its ugly head again. The menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause can create a bunch of hormonal swings in the body. For some women they may find their skin improves, but for many these hormonal swings can trigger acne to form.

My suspicion is that women who get acne due to hormone swings such as those listed above likely have an overloaded liver. The liver cannot expel the excess hormones as fast as it needs to, and so the excess hormones get recirculated through the body.

Performance Enhancing Drugs

Steroids and other questionable performance enhancing drugs all artificially inflate certain hormones in your body. Not to mention the fact that they're hormones that generally promote growth. Just imagine how that is affecting your skin and oil glands.

If you are taking performance enhancing drugs you should be aware of all the health risks involved. Acne is a very small part - it's just another indication something is wrong on the inside.

Hormones and Acne are Closely Linked

So now I hope you can see the myriad of ways hormones and acne are related. It's pretty amazing just how interconnected your body is. There are many ways your hormone levels could be put out of balance, or at least from what they "normally" should be.

I hope I've provided some insight into what some of the possible causes of acne could be for you. Work on getting your hormones in check and your health will dramatically improve.

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