Your diet is very important to the health of your hair and the effects of your daily nutrition on its growth and appearance should not be ignored.
Hair is not a vital organ or tissue, and this means your body will never prioritize its nutritional needs. Due to its expendable nature, a nutritional imbalance will often show up first in the form of excessive hair loss. Also, hair is one of the fastest-growing tissues in the body, it grows 1.2cm per month, so any long-term reduction in certain nutrients to the hair follicle may disturb the hair growth cycle.
Your hair cells, as well as the cells throughout your body, need a balance of proteins, complex carbohydrates, iron, vitamins and minerals to function at their best. Hair and scalp problems can arise from either a deficiency or an excess of nutrients in your diet, and in some cases nutrition alone can be the cause of hair loss or slow hair growth. For example, we often see hair loss as the sole result of iron and ferritin (stored iron) deficiency.
To help you understand this better, we will put hair growth and the nutrients needed to sustain it into perspective. These days there are a lot of diets and eating habits considered to be “healthy eating” however this often doesn’t include all of the elements needed for optimum hair growth, health and appearance.
With this being said we believe that a well-balanced diet helps ensure you get all of the vitamins and minerals you need for healthy hair cell renewal, however, metabolism and nutritional needs vary among individuals. Furthermore, stressful lifestyles and hectic day-to-day responsibilities often make it challenging to eat a nutritionally balanced diet all the time, as do dietary restrictions, illness, pregnancies and vegan/vegetarian diets. As well as this, stress and eating foods that have been overly processed can actually impede the absorption of certain nutrients, so supplements can be extremely helpful.
We use and recommend Apotecari Bioactive Haircare to maintain hair and scalp health. These hair supplements specifically target the hair and scalp and are more specific than the hair, skin and nail supplements found in supermarkets and pharmacies.
