ONLINE DRIVERS MEDIA

If you want to know how to get of pubertal acne, you got to ask professional pubescents ;-)

The study at hand is not only the first experimental verification of the efficacy of omega-3 + gamma linoleic acid supplementation in acne treatment, its also "paleo approved", because it cites a study by no one else but Loraine Cordaine himself ;-) Dont worry, I am just kiddin around. In spite of the fact that Cordains study "Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization" (Cordain. 2002) is in fact the #1 on the reference list, the scientists from the Seoul National University College of Medicine refrain from (paleolithic) dairy bashing in their evaluation of "the clinical efficacy and safety of omega-3 fatty acids and of GLA for the treatment of mild to moderate facial acne." (Jung. 2014)

If you google "natural acne treatment" it will usually not take long until you find a reference to fish oil and gamma linoleic acid (as in borage or starflower oil). Against that background it is surprising that the Korean scientist are obviously the first to scrutinize the efficacy of 2,000 mg of eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid and 400 mg ?-linoleic acid (from borage oil) in a parallel design dietary intervention study.

Long-standing "natural acne cure" now scientifically proven

The 45 participants with mild to moderate acne, were allocated to either of the intervention groups for 10 weeks, after which the effect on their skin was evaluated visually and via heamatoxylin, eosin and immunohistochemical staining of the lesions.
And what the scientists observed was ... positive, at least in the omega-3 group, the mean inflammatory acne lesion count was significantly reduced (from 10.1 ± 3.2 in week 0 to 5.8 ± 3.4 in week 10; p < 0.05).

Figure 1: Changes in inflammatory acne lesion counts with time (left, top), noninflammatory acne lesion counts with time (left, bottom), and changes in patients subjective assessment (VAS) with time (right; Jung. 2014)

As you can see in Figure 1, a similar change was observed in the GLA (9.8 ± 5.2 before vs. 8.0 ± 4.6 after 5 weeks vs. 6.6 ± 3.7 after 10 weeks, p < 0.05), but not in the control group (9.9 ± 4.3 before to 10.2 ± 6.2 after 10 weeks).

Figure 2: Before (top) and after (bottom) photos (Jung. 2014)

"Mean non-inflammatory acne lesion counts were also reduced by omega-3 and GLA supplementation (23.5 ± 9.2 to 18.9 ± 8.3, p < 0.05, and 22.8 ± 8.4 to 19.2 ± 7.2, p < 0.05, respectively) at final visits, whereas mean lesion count in the control group was unchanged (from 21.8 ± 9.7 to 22.0 ± 8.6). Significant differences were evident between the treatment groups and the control group after 10 weeks (p < 0.05)." (Jung. 2014)

In the end, there was no no significant difference between the two treatments for any of the measured parameters, so that it is probably up to you, whether you try to control the "fire within your skin" with GLA or DHA + EPA supplements.
References:

• Cordain, Loren, et al. "Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization." Archives of Dermatology 138.12 (2002): 1584-1590.
• Jung, Jae Yoon, et al. "Effect of Dietary Supplementation with Omega-3 Fatty Acid and gamma-linolenic Acid on Acne Vulgaris: A Randomised, Double-blind, Controlled Trial." (2014).
• Wolf, Ronni, Hagit Matz, and Edith Orion. "Acne and diet." Clinics in dermatology 22.5 (2004): 387-393.

Blueberries and other foods w/ tons of polyphenols are GSH boosters (Moskaug. 2005) and make supplements obsolete.

If you have been interested in dietary supplements for some time, I am pretty sure that you will have heard about oral glutathione ob(GSH) supplements in one of the "snake oil warnings" on various websites. The "master antioxidant" as it is called is after all believed by many to be not bioavailable - at least not orally. Studies in animal models, however, have already shown that oral GSH, administered either in the diet or by gavage, has the ability to increase plasma and tissue GSH levels ( Loven. 1986; Aw. 1991; Favilli. 1997; Kariya. 2007). It would thus be more appropriate to say that the efficacy of oral glutathione in humans has not yet been tested in peer-reviewed studies.
Now, the absence of human studies should definitely ring an alarm bell in the head of every healthily skeptic supplement user, what it should not do, though is mislead you to believe that GSH supplements dont work in human beings.

Now this is where John P. Richie Jr. and his colleagues from the Penn State Cancer Institute, the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Penn State University College of Medicine and the Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science, come into play. As the scientist state, their "objective was to determine the long-term effectiveness of oral GSH supplementation on body stores of GSH in healthy adults." (Richie. 2014)
To this end, they conducted a 6-month randomized, double-blinded,placebo-controlled trial in the course of which the subjects, 41 women and 13 men (6 dropouts not included) with a normal BMI and no known health issues, consumed either ...

• an oral GSH supplement dosed at 250mg/day,
• an oral GSH supplement dosed at 1,000mg/day, or
• an identically looking placebo.

The main study outcomes were obviously analyses of the GSH levels in (a) blood, (b) erythrocytes, (c) plasma, (d) lymphocytes and (e) exfoliated buccal mucosal cells (the effects on a battery of immune markers was tested only in a handful of subjects).

Figure 1: Effects of 6 months GSH supplementation on ratio of oxidized to reduced GSH and natural killer cell cytotoxicity in healthy men and women aged 28-72y (Richie. 2014)

As the data in Figure 1 already suggests, there was a dose-dependent increase in GSH levels. With the high dose (1,000mg/day) producing GSH increases of 30–35 % in erythrocytes, plasma and lymphocytes and 260 % in buccal cells (P<0.05) and increases of 17 and 29 % in blood and erythrocytes, respectively, in the low-dose group (P<0.05 - data not shown in Figure 1).

These improvements had beneficial downstream effects on the overall status of the subjects antioxidant defense system. A fact you can conclude based on the decreased ratio of oxidized (used) to reduced (fresh) glutathione in whole blood the scientists observed in their subjects after 6 months. These benefits came hand in hand with an increase in natural killer cytotoxicity (+100%), another potentially highly desirable health benefit.

References:

• Aw, Tak Yee, Grazyna Wierzbicka, and Dean P. Jones. "Oral glutathione increases tissue glutathione in vivo." Chemico-biological interactions 80.1 (1991): 89-97.
• Favilli, Fabio, et al. "Effect of orally administered glutathione on glutathione levels in some organs of rats: role of specific transporters." British journal of nutrition 78.02 (1997): 293-300.
• Kariya, Chirag, et al. "A role for CFTR in the elevation of glutathione levels in the lung by oral glutathione administration." American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology 37.6 (2007): L1590.
• Loven, Dean, et al. "Effect of insulin and oral glutathione on glutathione levels and superoxide dismutase activities in organs of rats with streptozocin-induced diabetes." Diabetes 35.5 (1986): 503-507.
• Moskaug, Jan Ø., et al. "Polyphenols and glutathione synthesis regulation." The American journal of clinical nutrition 81.1 (2005): 277S-283S.
• Richie Jr, John P., et al. "Randomized controlled trial of oral glutathione supplementation on body stores of glutathione." European journal of nutrition (2014): 1-13.