Acne, the pimpled curse of puberty, could be a plague triggered by refined white bread and breakfast cereal, according to researchers.

The Australians plan to test 60 teenage boys with a low carbohydrate diet for three months and see if there is a difference.

If a diet low on Mother's Pride turns the boys back into a pride and joy to their parents, it may demonstrate that wheat or refined starch has been the villain all along.

Acne is a mystery affliction: US dermatologists recently looked at 250 studies involving 150 drugs or other medical treatments, and could come to no conclusion as to what worked or why. "Here we are in the 21st century and and we still don't have an answer," one admitted.

The New Scientist reports today that, according to Loren Cordain, an evolutionary biologist in Colorado State University, highly-processed breads and cereals are easily digested, producing a flood of sugars that in turn triggers high levels of insulin and an insulin-like growth factor.

This in turn leads to an excess of male hormones, which encourage the skin to ooze sebum, the greasy product that acts as a beacon for acne-promoting bacteria.

Up to 95% of 18-year-olds in modern societies are afflicted by zits, pimples, and explosions of acne. They are almost unknown in subsistence societies in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea. The Inuit of Alaska were once clear-skinned: acne arrived in the far north with a western diet of waffles, hotcakes, sliced bread, and doughnuts.

Neil Mann of RMIT University (formerly the Royal Melbourne institute of technology) is proposing a systematic study to take the starch out of his volunteer teenagers.

"Dermatologists will tell you they have put patients on low carbohydrate diets and seen improvements," he said. "This will be the first controlled study."