The Scientific Method and Zits

In grade school I was always a good student but there was one thing that I just couldn't get my young brain around: Science projects.

A Science project required 3 things I had a lot of trouble with as a kid. 1)Long Term Planning, 2)Actually physically doing something instead of just reading, and 3)Interacting with judges in the Science Fair.
In the eighth grade I didn't even do my Science Project. My teacher was irate but I had nothing but A's for the rest of the year so I got by with a B. In response to this she changed the rules the next year that failure to complete a Science Fair Project resulted in a fail.

For some reason I just couldn't wrap my head around the scientific method. Like, some kids did a project to see how receiving light 24 hours a day affected plants. I couldn't see the sense in that. Real plants don't get light 24 hours a day. Who cares? I also had a lot of trouble with the idea of a hypothesis. I kept thinking that if my hypothesis turned out to be incorrect I'd done something wrong. So I'd mess with the data until it turned out the way it should have been. I was a terrible scientist. We were also supposed to keep a log of all the progress made on our project. I didn't do it of course, so it turned into a creative writing project the night before the seventh grade science fair when I went back faked three months of entries, complete with little details about the seasonal changes.

Anyway, I got it into my head that I just wasn't cut out to be a scientist. It took me quite a long time to get over that self-created mental block. But eventually I found out that I really love science. I love understanding how things really are, finding the underlying structure of the world, and being excited, not dissapointed, when the hypothesis is wrong.

A few months ago I started getting these weird pimples along my brow line. I have no problem with the occasional zit here or there, it's part of life, but these were little clusters of small dots in a very specific line going from the tip of one eyebrow to the other. I've never had pimples there, and it seemed clear that these were being caused by something new in my life. So I started thinking about how to find out what was bringing these on. My exercise habits hadn't changed recently, so it seemed likely to be a food that had been consuming more of than usual.

My first hypothesis was the Excelsior Mocha. The weeks leading up to the outbreak, for some reason I had been craving this drink from Japan's Starbucks ripoff, Caffe Excelsior. This mocha is in no way a good thing to drink. It's made by a machine, with a syrupy chocolate sauce that forms a sludge on the bottom when you finish. It doesn't even taste that good. But for some reason, I kept on craving those things a few times a week. And since Cafe Excelsior is about 10 steps away from the studio, I was really hitting them hard. Surely overdosing on this nasty chocolate mixture was causing the zits.

So I quit the mochas and haven't had one since. But the pimples remained. They were still getting that oily fuel from somewhere. My mocha hypothesis was wrong. So I started looking for other things I had changed in my diet recently.

Around the time the pimples came I moved from my apartment, and for a few weeks was unable to prepare many meals as the gas was off, the pans were in boxes, I didn't have time to go to the grocery store, etc... As a result I was supplementing my sparse meals with these things called BalanceUp from the Asahi corporation. I really like these little bars. The blueberry ones are super tasty and they have a lot of vitamins, not that I care about that. If you have to eat from a convenience store you could do worse. I had been eating one of these things a day during the moving time, sometimes more. They seemed so innocuous, but the only way to check my hypothesis was to stop eating them and see what happened. So as with the mochas I quit BalanceUp and haven't had one since.

And within a few days the pimples cleared up. Ah Ha! Culprit found! Blog post over. Or is it?

You see, I told you before I am a terrible scientist. And to assume the Vitamin Cookies were to blame would be terrible science. To make a valid claim about the effect of anything you must have a control group. So the kid who did the plants that received 24 hours of light a day had another batch of plants that got normal amounts of light. That way you can see if your results are truly from what you're doing and not from another factor you hadn't considered.

Control groups are pretty easy to arrange for fruit-flies and flora, but human beings offer a huge challenge. Even if you get two people of the same sex and age there are billions of differences between them. Their DNA, the way their body reacts to things, their mental states, their living conditions, the list is endless. The bottom line is that you'll never find a suitable control group for yourself, because there's only one you.

So the pimples could have been the BalanceUp, but that would be at best a guess. Let's think about the situation that was leading up to me drinking a lot of mochas and eating convenience store snacks. I was moving. On top of the multiple jobs I do, and running three simultaneous PCPs. I was stressed. That's why I kept wanting those cathartic mochas. That's why I didn't have time to cook real food and was eating packaged crap from 7-11. Once I settled in, my stress levels returned to normal.

Stress is a really toxic process for your body, (I wrote extensively about it here) and probably introduces a lot more nasty stuff into your system than a daily vitamin cookie. Of course it could have been some weird reaction to my new apartment. It could have been anything.

And that's the point isn't it, that we are such a complicated collection of physical processes that there is never a simple culprit behind disease. We want there to be. We want there to be a clear reason some people get zits and some people get cancer, but it's just not there. Making peace with this is a good start on moving towards a balanced life. When you accept that you can't target any one thing to magically make you healthy, you start to cover all your bases. Which in terms of your body is consistent diet, exercise, stress management, and social interaction.

It's not very satisfying for our scientific minds, but it's far more realistic than wildly swinging between fad diets, magic pills, and expensive analysis.