Hello, i am a biochemist @ Fordham University in NYC and would like to respond to you're question.
--Hidden deep within Casanova's 16 volumes of memoirs is a short but powerful story. A girl of a well established family of the court needed help clearing her cystic acne. Casanova offers her incredibly clairvoyant advice which I have transposed into a simple acronym to help folks remember--BAD.
B-burdock root
A-vitamin A
D- vitamin D and no Dairy
Interestingly I stumbled across this somewhat serendipitously as I was at Borders book store (before their bankruptcy LOL) and wanted to see what Casanova's writing was all about so randomly picked up a volume and this was in the very first paragraph that I read. He suggested eating carrots with a small amount of fat. We now know this as vitamin A which is fat soluble. He suggested staying out in the sunlight (esp in winter) for a half hour a day. We now know this to be vitamin D (more on that in a bit). Burdock root was a prevalent plant growing throughout Europe and he suggested making it into a tea. Lastly, he suggested eliminating dairy from the diet. Now many who embrace this Paleo lifestyle will argue in milks favor and say it has roots going back 1000's of years. This is silly. From a physiological standpoint every human is allergic to milk and even those who possess the lactose friendly enzymes need to understand that these enzymes do not work all that efficiently and are likely hundreds of years of genetic variability away from perfecting themselves. Now, when we consider the genetic tampering, hormone injecting, pasteurization, unnatural diet/feeding and stress we put on the modern bovine the milk we drink is nowhere near as healthy or pure as that of our ancestors. For goodness sake the vast majority (90%) of the worlds milk up until 1900 didn't even come from the bovine but goats. Too, let's also consider the quantity of dairy consumed in the modern diet which is anywhere between 50x and 100x more than our ancestors. Consumed in any significant quantity, milk is a highly unnatural substance for grown humans as we are the only species that's ever lived that regularly consumes milk after weaning.
Back to Casanova. I've been involved in research testing interactions between vitamins and herbs for a while now and relevantly to our conversation the interactions between burdock root and vitamin D (D3). In our tests we found vitamin D increased the anti microbial properties of burdock root some 10 fold. We called it "hulking" because the D3 would essentially turn the burdock root molecules crazy. I have not had the opportunity to study the interactions between vitamin A and vitamin D although some evidence suggests they may work synergistically to eliminate acne. 1938 article-http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1659595/pdf/calwestmed00364-0024.pdf
Like I said before, Casanova was incredibly clairvoyant to put these 3 substances together not knowing the science behind them because they seem to work together very well from a science pov. In the real world I have given this daily recommendation to approximately 30 people who suffered from acne based on Casanova's original theorem and my leveraging of science to tweak it-
5000 IU vitamin D
8000 IU vitamin A
2000 mg Burdock Root
All these together can be purchased for under $30 at you're local Whole Foods or Grocer in the form of pills. I live in NYC and my friends are very ethnically diverse as were the others I recommended this to. Every single person that used this BAD system were clear within 3 months. I don't mean a little improvement either. I mean clear as in cured. Luckily I've never suffered too terribly from acne myself but my brother on the other hand did. He had bad facial acne and even worse bacne. He used this system and was clear in a few months. I saw his whole attitude, personality and motivation change for the better.
In conclusion, one of the biggest boons of living in the information technology age is that it allows anybody to leverage science with information- Even if that information was hidden deep in a series of capricious volumes written over 200 years ago by a womanizing adventurer. Hope this helps! Share the info when you're clear!
--6 months later upon seeing her again Casanova hardly recognized the girl nor did the court. She looked years younger and not a blemish about her skin. Casanova laughed with glee knowing he had built rapport and done the hard work months previously. Now all he had to do was remain sober enough to walk to his bed. And he did.--
