Ralph M. Trüeb - Nutrition for Healthy Hair: Guide to Understanding and Proper Practice

Courtesy of Dr. Harry P. Michaelides, DDS, Chicago, IL, USA

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.Hippocrates (460370 BC)

Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat is a proverb originally attributed to the classical Greek Athenian philosopher Socrates and later reiterated by the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. Yet another Ancient Greek, Hippocrates, was among the first to establish the role of diet in health and disease. He proposed lifestyle modifications, including dietary factors, to prevent or treat diseases, and is therefore often quoted with Let food be thy medicine. And yet, there is hardly another field with so much prejudice, misconception, and debate as diet and health, let alone hair health. In his publication How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman from Harvard Medical School focuses on the thinking errors in medicine, and among them ultimately states that Aside from relatively common dietary deficiencieslack of vitamin B12 causing pernicious anemia, or insufficient vitamin C giving rise to scurvylittle is known about the effects of nutrition on many bodily functions.

The fact is that quantity and quality of hair are closely related to the nutritional state of an individual. Normal supply, uptake, and transport of proteins, calories, trace elements, and vitamins are of fundamental importance in tissues with a high biosynthetic activity such as the hair follicle. Because hair shaft is composed almost entirely of protein, protein component of diet is critical for production of normal healthy hair. The rate of mitosis is sensitive to the calorific value of diet, provided mainly by carbohydrates. Finally, a sufficient supply of vitamins and trace metals is essential for the biosynthetic and energetic metabolism of the follicle.

Since an important commercial interest lies in the nutritional value of nutritional supplements, a central question that arises is whether increasing the content of a seemingly adequate diet with specific amino acids, vitamins, and/or trace elements may further promote hair growth and quality. Pharmacy aisles and Internet drugstores are full of nutritional supplements promising full, thick, luscious hair for prices that range from suspiciously cheap to dishearteningly exorbitant. It would appear that unless hair loss is due to a specific nutritional deficiency, there is only so much that nutritional therapies can do to enhance hair growth and quality. And yet, there are a number of factors, such as inborn errors of metabolism, life cycle needs, dietary habits, lifestyle, environmental toxins, age, and comorbidities, that influence hair health to such a degree, that nutritional therapy can boost hair that is suffering from these multifaceted issues.

This book aims at distinguishing facts from fiction, and at providing a sound scientific basis for nutrition-based strategies for healthy hair, at the same time acknowledging the problems and limitations of our current understanding and practice.