asked before but.. is local natural honey bad for our MGDs? cant get a docs answer!

[jenny2008]

whenever i ask an eye specialist about diet and/or honey in regards to MGD they all pretty much say you just need to increase omega 3s..etc... i never get an answer..

since honey is considered refined-although it does have inflammatory properties i am wondering if it is harmful to the mgds???? anybody have experience with it and what it does?
i was taking 1-2 tsp per day for allergies (local honey)... it is sugar so now i am thinking this wouldnt be on the rosacea diet?? although some things ive read said it was fine on that diet. others said it was a no no... also, i gave up all grains and oats on my diet as well...

anybody ?? help?

[littlemermaid]

Hi Jenny,

I feel your confusion! I think the rosacea trigger lists eg on the forums or in the books are only intended to be helpful collections of what other people have found cause their flare-ups. Obviously not everything on the list for one person! People must be different according to their diet history and metabolism and food intolerances, as people are allergic to different things.

I understand it's more personal - a question of noticing what happens to your eyes after eating certain foods to find out if they make things better or worse, or don't make a scrap of difference. If honey is helping with allergies and doesn't make your eyes flare-up worse, then why stop?

Whereas, with the fish/flaxseed oils researchers have measured improvement in the meibom consistency so docs are confident to recommend trying that, but that's as far as we go with certainty in the diet/inflammation theory so far!

[SAAG]

Not sure what rosacea diet you are referring to Jenny... but honey is sugar, so will spike your insulin levels the same as a a spoonful of white sugar. My understanding is that the spike in insulin levels is what leads to inflammation. So I assume too much sugar from any source (even honey) is not the best. But as littlemermaid said, if the amount of honey you are ingesting does not seem to cause any problems for you, and is helping your allergies, then maybe it's worth continuing?

There are no good large studies on this stuff as far as I know... so I doubt you'll find any mainstream doc who will advise a drastic diet change for MGD... such things aren't in any of the treatment guidelines that they base their treatments on. So, trying a low carb diet or anti-inflammatory diet is purely an experiment - if it helps, awesome. If not, well, then it didn't help

[jenny2008]

SAAG are sweet potatoes ok to eat on the rosacea diet??? withou honey of course!! )) thanks@!!!

[spmcc]

There is no issue with sugar on a rosacea diet (altho I don't know everything about Brady Burrow's version). See here for most common trigger foods: http://www.rosacea.org/patients/materials/triggers.php

The thing to remember about avoiding things like vinegar is that you have to read labels! Pretty much all marinades and condiments (including mayo) contain vinegar.

Personally, I have never heard anything about a rosacea diet being equivalent to a low glycemic index diet.

[SAAG]

There is no issue with sugar on a rosacea diet (altho I don't know everything about Brady Burrow's version). See here for most common trigger foods: http://www.rosacea.org/patients/materials/triggers.php

The thing to remember about avoiding things like vinegar is that you have to read labels! Pretty much all marinades and condiments (including mayo) contain vinegar.

Personally, I have never heard anything about a rosacea diet being equivalent to a low glycemic index diet.

It's Brady Barrows who's "rosacea diet" recommends starting out with an ultra low-carb diet in addition to eliminating rosacea triggers. I agree with you spmcc, until the Barrows book, I'd never, ever seen anything about low-carb or anti-inflammatory diets being of any use for rosacea.

On a side note, I had found an journal article somewhere explaining rosacea as a vascular disease, and it seems to me that inflammation was somehow involved... if this hypothesis is true, it would make sense that anti-inflammatory effects (ex. a so-called anti-inflammatory diet) would be helpful in addition to eliminating triggers. But it's all just conjecture at this point I suppose... I'm certainly not suggesting this is proven or anything like that... merely something to consider if other treatments are not helping.

Jenny, sweet potatoes are essentially carbs, so Brady Barrows does not recommend it in his version of the rosacea diet. (at least not in the first 4 weeks where he recommend the super strict diet) I ordered the book off Amazon.com after Dr. L. suggested it in one of his forum posts... it's kind of a rambling style of writing, and I wouldn't take everything Brady says as gospel (he's just a layperson, and not a doctor or anything like that)... but there is lots of food for thought in there. (pardon the pun)

[littlemermaid]

OK, this is just what I'm thinking from our current experience and the docs are just looking at me with one finger on the panic button while trying to keep an open mind... (I get that a lot).

It's also a big worry that food triggers and systemic inflammation won't be the problem for many people, they read about this, and then it would be wrong/harmful/depressing/even-more-misery to pursue this - it could be eating better and more is a big help, like ColinP!

http://members.rosacea-research-and-...?showtopic=958
Here's Brady Barrows on sugar. I think this is overdoing it a bit, isn't it? Although I understand where he's going with this. He wants to help people find inflammation triggers for rosacea (vinegar and soy sauce is histamine?). Rosacea sufferers also consider their skin and metabolic reactions to environment: chemicals, allergens, stress, even sunlight (help me Spmcc!).

Reading round the forums and health department websites, people are finding some foods make their systemic inflammatory conditions worse and they feel better avoiding them (eg bowel, face skin, other skin, joints). Same as people avoid their allergens. Some people find their immune system changed (eg response to infection, steroid use) and set up chronic inflammatory responses. Or that they improve if they are not feeding internal bugs which feast on sugar and high GI (eg fungal, bacteria). No one has yet found a marker to measure this inflammatory response in blood tests like allergy because the inflammations are different pathways.

So it's a question of noticing what helps/doesn't to pin down the culprits. This is quite difficult because the inflammation response is not necessarily immediate like allergy so you might be feeling it next day. Also see Rosaceacommunity food threads for how different people's triggers are http://rosacea-support.org/community/viewforum.php?f=21.

Different techniques I've read about include: elimination (eat only food you don't normally and reintroduce your normal foods one by one to see what happens), or intolerance (keep a symptoms diary looking for correlations), or desensitisation (eg eliminate weekdays, reintroduce in very small quantity eg weekends - now you're liking this more).

What we are doing is: eliminate common suspects to see if we feel better. Now the 'advantage' for us with acne rosacea is that the response shows up pretty fast on the face. Also we see what comes out the meibomian glands. And whether the tear film looks/feels good or not. Whether painful flare-ups stop. Very unscientific, but kinder.

The Brady Barrow rosacea diet list is useful for thinking about common suspects. But there are others according to individual metabolism and history and developed sensitivity. Eg one lady told me her son found his inflammation triggers for acne rosacea were orange juice, bananas and strawberries, things he overdid as a child.

This may also explain why people become intolerant of sugars, gluten, yeast and dairy (dairy intolerance can be due to absence/loss of digestive enzymes as we get older). And problems show in different ways as well as eg bowel. In our case, face.

I see this on poor LM's acne rosacea face after the party pizza/brownie+icecream/soda combo. Last time she attempted this we had painful emergency dash to the eye clinic 2 days later (clogged meibom, inflamed eye surface). Consider the actual ingredients. It just ain't 'natural' to eat this - we are apes!

Fats affect meibom. This is why the docs recommend fish/flaxseed oil, but we also need to reduce processed fats, meat fat and dairy to improve it. I can see this in the meibom. This looks at first like a separate issue, but dietary fats do also change steroid/hormone/lipid metabolism. We also need to consider any nutritional deficiency. Anyone got a friendly biochemist?!

For us, it's a question of eating more of the good and varied stuff! - soups, mixed dressed salads, fish, poultry, delicious tangy goat/sheep cheese, gorgeous lightly spiced pulses... yeh, I know. I just feel we're all suffering enough and there's a good way of changing diet. Just putting it out there.

[jenny2008]

i know sweet potatoes are carbs but my naturopath has me on them... i dont eat any grains, no oats.. no beans... all these diets have different "ideas" behind them..and i get that.. if i follow the one i have been on i hvae to eat something to keep me full...
i just dont know... thanks for the answers!!!

[SAAG]

Nice post LittleMermaid!

OK, this is just what I'm thinking from our current experience and the docs are just looking at me with one finger on the panic button while trying to keep an open mind... (I get that a lot).

LOL... that's awesome, and soooo true

[spmcc]

I suppose there are two points I would like to suggest about diet:

1) Instead of doing something SO drastic (and difficult to do) as an "no gluten, no sugar, no fat, no dairy, no carb etc. diet", just try to eliminate the main rosacea triggers listed here http://www.rosacea.org/patients/materials/triggers.php.

It's just easier to do this. Then at some point try one of the trigger foods and see what happens.

Also try to keep a diary. Easier to say than do, I know!

Personally, I seem to have always know that tomatoes are my enemy. So, give me something like lasagna and I'm in a terrible state!

2) Watch out for naturopath tests telling you that you are allergic/sensitive to certain foods. There was something in the news recently about this -

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...ontent=2376863

http://www.vancouversun.com/health/F...572/story.html

(the full abstract for Lavine's article is not available on pubmed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22431905)

[jenny2008]

thanks for the heads up spmcc...
as i have sjogrens i have ups and downs all the time--and it could be from nothing i ate u know.. its just part of sjogrens/autoimmune along with mgd...
i flared so bad for 2 weeks and that was after giving up most food for 2 and 1/2 months so i am not sure what to think of that..plus i had flares all along....
i know there are times in the past i have eaten tons of sugar and felt crappy the next day, there are times i ate no sweets watched everything and didnt flare up ,, and then there are those times that i am flared up for almost a month at a time..to me i think its my sjogrens... im kinda coming to the conclusion its good to avoid triggers-if you know what they are-eat as healthy as you can-but also enjoy things and life cause you can flare up even when you are the most strict ever!!

[Hopeful2]

Thanks for the articles spmcc. I do agree that food sensitivity testing does appear to be somewhat unscientific. My test consisted of holding a vial containing an extract of a certain food and then having an instrument measure some electrical energy in my other hand. One might ask how the energy of the food item can be transmitted through the plastic container it is held in? One thing for certain, the results where certainly very reproducible, so something must be happening.

In any case, I do think food plays a role in our health, and avoiding obvious poor food choices may be the way to go.

[jenny2008]

hopeful2..where did you go for your testing? what type of doc? thanks!