Since this is not life or death medical question, I’m hoping for some dermatological advice here.
About 6 months ago, I started reading some negative articles about taking multi-vitamins. I decided to quit taking my once-a-day GNC Mega Man VitaPak. It was pretty annoying taking the 5 to 8 pills every afternoon anyway. Plus I also read that many of the fillers and “inert” ingredients that GNC uses are cheap and not necessarily harmless.
Soon after I quit, I noticed that I started getting occasional but stubborn pimples on my forehead or jaw just below the ear. At first I assumed it was just my body getting rid of toxins, etc.
Now that it’s been a while, it seems the occasional pimples continue to emerge.
I’m a 44 year old male so it had been a pretty long time since I had any pimples at all, and now they’re pretty frequent. Does anyone have any opinion about what may be causing them and any recommendations on how to fix the problem? I suppose I could go back to the vitamins, but I am trying to avoid them. Or perhaps I could switch to a higher quality vitamin that doesn’t take a liter of water to consume. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Extra vitamins don’t prevent pimples, as teenagers know from bitter experience.
And 5 to 8 vitamin pills per day! :eek: You’re well out of that scam. (It may not have been actively harmful, except to your wallet, but no way does anyone need to be taking anything like that amount of vitamins - though, as you imply, they were probably mostly filler anyway.)
There are a variety of Mega Men Vitapaks created for one’s age, lifestyle, etc. I’ve tried a few of them but always seemed it was just way too many pills.
It’s possible for any change in diet to indirectly lead to pimples breaking out. Just about any change in lifestyle could do it too. But it’s near impossible to attribute the pimples to anything in particular, you’re likely to blame the first thing that comes to mind forgetting about the different soap you use to wash your face.
I have seen claims that acne may be helped by Vitamin A and/or Vitamin D. Quite possibly baseless, but if I were you I might try eating more A-rich or D-rich foods, or taking a simple one-a-day multivitamin, and see if that helps.
Slight hijack, but I’m curious: are the various pills in the packs different types? In other words, does one day’s worth of pills include a yellow pill for beta carotene, for example, and two little purple pills with, I dunno, biotin, iron and vitamin C? Or are they each 1/8ths worth of the same multi-ingredient combo?
Either way, I’d imagine staggering your supplement intake - as opposed to all in one big whallop a la the classic daily Centrum tablet - would improve absorption, but I have no cites to back that up besides a vague recollection that some micro-nutrients can block or assist each other’s uptake.
Concur that vitamin supplements neither prevent nor exacerbate zits.
Interesting. After four years on prenatal vitamins, I finally used them up and quit taking anything, about six months ago. Cue a horrid resurgence of the cystic acne that I had conquered, a decade earlier, using Proactiv.
Proactiv alone won’t control it now. I’ve gotta use tretinoin, too, and even so I still get nasty zits every now and then. I am 34 and female.
