Best Way to Eat Well for Healthy Hair



Eat well, and your hair will repay you by gleaming with health. The following hints will help you choose the best foods for healthy hair and show you how to keep it in top condition.

Your hair is what you eat, and if you want lustrous, shiny hair, eating a balanced, organic diet will help feed it with nutrients. Skimping on nutrition, meanwhile, can have a negative impact on your hair’s condition.

Healthy Hair Best Way to Eat Well for Healthy Hair

One of the world’s leading hair experts, Philip Kingsley, reports a huge surge in the number of 25- to 35-year-olds coming into his clinic with thinning hair, and poor nutrition is the culprit. He blames leaving long gaps between meals and a calorie intake of under 2,000 per clay; excessive exercise can also impact on hair health. According to Kingsley, four-hour-plus lapses between meals on a regular basis can create a drop in energy levels in the hair follicles. He advises carrying fruit as a snack and making sure all meals are well balanced.

Good hair foods include wholegrain bread, nonfat milk, chicken, orange juice, leafy dark vegetables (including kale, spinach, and mustard greens), and broccoli. Boost your intake of vitamin B2 and biotin by eating more avocados, yeast extract, tomatoes, and egg yolk. Zinc deficiency can also cause dry, flaky scalp.

In addition, it’s important to eat enough of the right fats and oils. According to some experts, women on very low-fat diets – in which less than 15 percent of their total daily calorie intake comes from fat – can develop thin, dull hair. If you start to eat well with hair health in mind, however, don’t expect overnight miracles. According to Philip Kingsley, “it takes at least three to four months for hair follicles to benefit from nutritional changes, and about six to twelve months before you’ll notice a difference in thinning hair.”

  • For healthy hair, drink at least two cups a day of herbal hair tea that contains such ingredients as rosemary, nettle, and horsetail. Combining them with other herbs such as peppermint gives a refreshing, pleasant taste.

Beauty and the brush

Your granny was right: brushing 50-100 strokes stimulates the scalp and helps spread the natural protective oils through the hair. Brushing hair can be a wonderful massage for the scalp, too.

Healthy Hair 1 Best Way to Eat Well for Healthy Hair

Hairbrushes can be made from many materials, including plastic and synthetics. Seek out those made from natural materials; rubber is much more gentle on the scalp than metal or plastic prongs. The most hair-friendly brushes have prongs that are mounted on a rubber pad, which allows the brush to breathe. If you can find brushes with wooden handles, they are lovely to touch, have a long life, and are also gentle on the scalp. Larger natural food stores often carry a range of wooden brushes. Aveda’s are excellent (they’re my brushes of choice), and widely available in stores.

Hair analysis – and what it tells you

Can your hair tell an expert whether you have a nutritional deficiency? Many complementary therapists believe so, although doctors are still skeptical. If you have hair problems -thinning or lackluster hair – this may be linked with a nutritional deficiency: for example, brittle hair can indicate a copper or calcium imbalance. Because what we eat, drink, and otherwise ingest is laid down in our hair, it is thought by some to be an indicator of what our diet is lacking. Think of a quarry, and how the different ages are represented by different strata of minerals. Hair is rather like that.

Many physicians still regard hair analysis as “nutritional quackery” (to quote one website), saying that there are no vitamins in the hair, except in the root below the scalp, and that it’s not possible to identify mineral deficiencies because lower limits of “normal” minerals in the hair have not been scientifically established. However, when taking into consideration that hair analysis is increasingly used by law courts to tell whether someone has taken drugs, it does not seem quite so easy to dismiss the idea that our hair gives clues to what we have and haven’t eaten, drunk, or otherwise consumed.

Healthy Hair 2 Best Way to Eat Well for Healthy Hair

Well-nourished hair

Of course, the best way to make sure your hair is being adequately nourished is to eat a varied, fresh organic diet, rich in wholegrains, fruit, and vegetables, and with minimum of sugar and alcohol. Before you submit to hair analysis – usually an expensive vitamin and mineral supplement regime will be recommended to combat your hair imbalances – eat as healthily as you can over a period of several months, and then see how your hair gleams, your skin glows with good health, and your energy level surges.



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