Psoriasis and sugar
I had really bad psoriasis and read that giving up sugar could help.
Within 24 hours I thought it was probably helping but thought it was also probably the placebo effect. That was around five years ago and I am still Psoriasis free. Yet I don’t read anything about this. Why not?
I’m delighted to hear that you are free of psoriasis! The question you are asking is whether this might be due to giving up sugar? The simple answer is that I don’t know. I guess you could try re-introducing sugar to see what happens, but I wouldn’t suggest that! The problem is that the relationship between diet and psoriasis is complex and very difficult to study scientifically. This is because most diets are composed of mixtures of macronutrients – carbohydrates (including sugars), fats and proteins. Trying to isolate and study a single food group – even in a laboratory – would be very difficult (imagine living only on sugar even for a short period!). This is why most of the scientific evidence we have is based on large surveys, which ask general questions about different food groups and then try to relate the findings to psoriatic symptoms. But this can only point to associations – not causal relationships. If specific scientific evidence is lacking for sugars, there is abundant evidence that being overweight increases the risk for psoriasis and – conversely – that losing weight reduces the symptoms of psoriatic disease. As is well known, consuming an excess of sugary foods is associated with weight gain, so in this sense, high sugar consumption may indirectly make psoriatic symptoms worse. But could eating sugars make psoriatic symptoms worse even in the absence of obesity? To repeat a point made earlier- we don’t know, because we don’t feed humans diets composed only of sugars. Intriguingly, however, some recent evidence in mice, showed that when fed with high sugar diets, they rapidly developed severe skin inflammation, well in advance of becoming obese. But of course, these are mice – not humans! So, to conclude: we don’t say a great deal about sugar specifically, precisely because we lack the scientific evidence that sugar acts as an independent promoter of skin inflammation. Instead, we offer general dietary advice for those with psoriasis – especially the Mediterranean Diet (which you can read here: https://www.papaa.org/knowledge-bank/knowledge-bank/further-reading/which-diet-for-psoriasis/ Hope that helps!
- Name: Dr David Ashton
- Topic: Psoriasis