The teen years can be rough under the best of circumstances. It’s like being the helpless driver of a vehicle that’s morphing from a tricycle into a bicycle, and then into a powerful motorcycle, with each new incarnation occurring before you really get the hang of the last one–all while you try to figure out where you’re going in a constantly changing, increasingly complex cityscape. That’s on the outside. On the inside, you’re possessed both by an urgent need to be accepted (if not admired), and (incongruously) by self-consciousness and wildly uncontrollable emotions. Oh–and you’re suddenly coming alive sexually and prone to obsessive infatuation.

All that might be manageable (most of us do get through it), but you look in the mirror one morning to discover a weird rash of horrific pustules glaring back from what used to be your baby-soft face. One or maybe two, you could explain as mosquito bites you foolishly scratched too vigorously. But florid zit-clusters on both cheeks? How could anyone negotiate the most judgmental society on Earth (high school) with any confidence, knowing they look like an escapee from a leper colony?

For a lot of people, this embarrassing affliction persists well into their twenties, prompting them to try all kinds of experimental cures and camouflage–to no avail. Drug companies cash in bigtime on this condition, shoveling antibiotics and topical creams onto a market desperate to look normal again. Some of these products, it seems, bring not relief, but permanent damage.

Worst of all–in my opinion–people often blame chocolate! And quite unfairly as it turns out. The real culprit? Dairy and sugar. Check it out: Large clinical studies have concluded that all that pimple-wreaking hormonal upheaval is caused by dairy and refined sugar.

The good news is two-fold:

     1) You can stop trying to scrub, scrape, squeeze, acid-burn, or cosmetic-slather your way to a smooth   complexion. All you have to do is stop eating dairy products and refined sugar!
     2) You can finally relax and enjoy dark chocolate fearlessly. Not that sickly-sweet milk chocolate, mind you–dark chocolate.

Milk: it does a body ugly.