What causes rosacea?

Officially, the scientific and medical communities don't know. But Brady Barrows, in his book Rosacea Diet, insists the culprit is sugar.

And the cure?

Well, there isn't one. But there is a way to keep rosacea from flaring up, Barrows claims: stay away from sugar.

Like most people with rosacea, Barrows says he used the standard treatments such as tetracycline and Metrogel for years. Sometimes he would go off them, but then he had to go back on when the disease splotched his face. Yet he could not escape the worry that constantly using these drugs could cause even worse maladies.

One day, Barrows' wife discovered the literature that condemns sugar as the cause of many of modern life's ills: heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other inflammatory ailments. When Barrows went off sugar completely, his rosacea cleared up. He decided to share his serendipity with others by researching and writing Rosacea Diet.

In his book, which is 225 pages long including indexes, Barrows starts by discussing the basics of rosacea such as how it is diagnosed and how it affects people who have it. Then he presents his idea that removing sugar from your diet and replacing it with protein, fat and water is essential for controlling rosacea outbreaks. He explains some of the body chemistry involved in eating and digesting sugar and tells why sugar is dangerous.

About a third of the book, and what makes it worth buying for your own use, is a set of diet plans--one for meat eaters and another for vegetarians. For thirty days, every meal and snack is laid out in detail. It's easy to follow a sugar-free, high-protein diet if you just eat what is in the charts that Barrows has prepared. (That's not the same as saying you'll enjoy it.) There are meal plans for breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as snacks during the day for thirty days.

It's nearly impossible, in our current prepared-food society, to find foods that don't have sugar in them. Barrows lists three pages of sugars that manufacturers use in their foods, including high fructose corn syrup, common cane and beet sugar (sucrose), milk sugar (lactose), molasses, honey, and dozens of others.

The secret, he says, is to replace all those prepared, sugar-filled foods with meats or soy or other sources of protein and with lots of vegetables, except those like corn and carrots that are high in sugars. On the rosacea diet, you avoid most fruits because of their high sugar content. Barrows also throws in plenty of black coffee or tea, presumably as a stimulant to help compensate for the loss of sugar.

The book directs you to a web site (www.rosacea-diet.com) that helps support those who use Barrows' diet to overcome rosacea. According to the site, hundreds of people have tried the diet with varying but mostly positive results. Even those whose rosacea has not been totally controlled by the diet--which Barrows attributes to their not effectively eliminating sugar--praise the absence of sugar in their lives. They lose weight, think clearly, and feel healthier.

Barrows' diet won't win gourmet awards. It's unimaginative and relies a lot on protein powder and salads. You can probably pencil in better alternatives yourself if you have any culinary skill. I've replaced that deluge of black coffee with more palatable herb teas and scoured cookbooks and the web for recipes that use Barrows' ingredients without adding sugars. But the book gets you started and gives you a way to organize yourself; that's 70% of getting there. It could even be 100% if the taste of your food isn't something you care about much.

Breaking away from sugar is difficult, even following Barrows' diet plan. I read somewhere that sugar is more addictive than heroin and my own experience is that it's plenty addictive enough. More than once, I've gone through the misery of sugar withdrawal only to fall off the wagon when a holiday came around. Yet when I manage to stay off sugar my rosacea is better. I get more work done because my brain is not foggy. I lose weight and and my stamina and general health improve.

In my view, if you want to get off tetracycline and Metrogel and improve your health at the same time, it's worth trying the Rosacea Diet approach.