I made a video this week! Woohoo!
Check it to find out if you have to quit coffee to clear your acne… a common question I get from the coffee lovers out there! You can also read the transcript below if you like reading better.
Video Transcript
Hey there Love Vitamin, nice to see you again 🙂 I know I haven’t made a video in a looooong ass time so I thought today is the day…
So this video is about “Do I have to give up coffee to clear my skin?” This is a question that I get a lot!
Because I get it …. people really like coffee. I have to admit I’ve never really been a big coffee drinker. So I don’t quite understand your pain head on, but I do get it when you really really like something and you’re like “Oh nooo, will I never get to have this again?”
So what’s the deal with coffee?
Coffee is actually proven to have quite a lot of health benefits to it… and apparently they never actually found a really strong link between coffee and blood sugar levels, which was what we are talking about last week – aka. keeping blood sugar levels stable in order to clear your skin.
So it has health benefits, but it also has a lot of caffeine, as you know. And when you have caffeine, what happens is that it releases a lot of adrenaline in your body.
Adrenaline is another word for stress…. you know when someone nearly hits your car…. your stress levels soar, and your adrenaline is going. That’s okay once in a while… but the problem is that you know how stressed out we are normally in the rest of our lives.
Caffeine doesn’t really help with that. Now the thing about caffeine though is that it really really depends on your body and your skin.
For some people, caffeine affects their skin a lot and for other people, caffeine is really no big deal.
There is really no way to know exactly unless you stop the coffee and see if it has an effect on your skin.
A big problem with coffee and the caffeine in it is the way people have it every single day …. they are relying on it to get through the day and they often use it as a meal replacement (same with, say, energy drinks)… like they will have coffee or an energy drink instead of eating breakfast.
Although it’s never really been shown that coffee in isolation has a big effect on blood sugar itself, if you are having coffee instead of breakfast… then it really has a bad effect on your hormones because the lack of food is causing you to crash and burn in conjunction with the adrenaline crash itself after the caffeine wears off….
So this has a bad effect on insulin and it really stresses out your adrenal glands and it messes up your hormones… you know all these things are bad for the body and skin.
So my opinion is that I can’t really recommend that you have it every single day… I don’t think it’s good for your health to be relying on it every single day… especially having it replace meals… and not to mention that most people put sugar and dairy into their coffee which is not really good for your skin either.
Like I said it really depends on you and your body as to how big a deal caffeine is. If you really, really, really love coffee maybe is no big deal to just have it maybe 2 to 3 times a week and make sure you have it with a good meal and not as a meal replacement. And definitely go easy on the milk and sugar.
Also if you really love the taste and it’s just the taste that really gets you, then go for decaf, although decaf doesn’t have all the health benefits of coffee because those are somehow taken out in the decaffeination process.
Also try to go for decaf in which the caffeine is removed with water or steam, because otherwise they use chemical processes to get rid of it.
So that’s the deal with coffee, in my opinion…. so I’m terribly sorry if you absolutely love it and you just don’t want to let go of it… but you know… what I can say! It might be a go for you and your skin, or it might not (as annoying as that answer is!)
Lots of love,
Tracy xo
Hi Tracy,
For the longest time I was super addicted to coffee and (blerg!) energy drinks. I think this was actually a huge factor in what caused me to start breaking out approximately 2 years ago.
My naturopath said that I needed to stop drinking coffee as part of a 3 month cleanse. He surprised me by saying that it’s not the caffeine that’s the main issue, it’s the acidity of the coffee and the impact it has on your gut. Apparently it acidifies the blood, irritates the gut lining and makes it more difficult to absorb certain nutrients.
Just mentioning this because I temporarily tried to drink decaf, but I don’t think that addresses the acidity issue. I have now switched to organic matcha tea, which still has a TON of caffeine (and way more antioxidants than green tea), but I don’t seem to be having any problems with it.
Hey Jackie, thanks for sharing your experience with it! The acidity thing is controversial I think so I didn’t include it, but someone else on the Love Vitamin facebook page said that decaf also makes them break out, sometimes even worse, so maybe it is quite a big factor
I used to have a huge problem with coffee making me break out…it took a while to link the coffee to the breakouts but once I figured it out there was no doubt it was the cause. I would get bad cystic acne shortly after drinking just one cup. It was really frustrating because nobody believed that coffee could cause me to break out, especially dermatologists. Somehow I do think it’s related to hormones because it hasn’t been as much of an issue since I got off birth control 6 months ago. I try not to drink coffee every day but when I do one cup seems to usually be okay, any more than that though and I’d be really pushing it. However, I have noticed that if I drink my hot beverages (coffee, tea, whatever) really hot it irritates my skin a bit, so I always try to wait for them to cool down before drinking. I think the acidity thing might be relevant as well because I’ve never had a problem with cold brew which is much lower acidity.
The problem with coffee is multi-fold. It’s not enough to simply say it’s bad or good, only that it varies according from individual to individual. T
The only problem is that when you take in the totality of the information regarding the studies done on for pesticides, mycotoxins, insulin resistance, vitamin/mineral absorption affects, etc, it becomes clear for most people, coffee is no bueno for acne, or at least would be a prudent item to eliminate from the diet.
Thank you for this article.