Vitamins and Your Hair

When it comes to looking and feeling good most of us long for silky, shiny hair – in abundance! So whether you’re losing your hair or worried about its appearance and condition, it’s worth thinking about your vitamin intake.

The Right Diet For Your Hair

Eating well is crucial to achieving a beautiful crowning glory. The vitamins that play the biggest roles in maintaining healthy-looking hair are:

• Vitamin A
• B vitamins
• Biotin
• Folic acid
• Vitamin E

All these vitamins are instrumental in healthy hair and hair growth. Perhaps the most interesting of these is biotin. Some experts believe that biotin prevents the hair from going grey and also that it could prevent hair loss. Found naturally in egg yolks, it is exciting to think biotin could be the answer to many a balding male’s dreams. The research on this is far from done, but if greying and hair loss are an issue for you, you might want to consider whether there is enough biotin in your diet.

As an antioxidant vitamin, vitamin E fights the cell-damaging free radicals that cause our body to age. So vitamin E could be a key element in preventing greying hair and hair loss too.

Traditional Hair Treats and Vitamins

For centuries, people have turned to foods rich in vitamins to add lustre, shine and vitality to their hair. These days, we understand how vitamins act in our bodies to support hair growth, but in days gone by, people nurtured their hair with olive oil, shea butter, carrot oil and coconut oil simply because they knew it made their hair look better. All these foods are rich in vitamins and many of them find their way into high-tech hair and beauty products today.

Too Much of a Good Thing

If vitamins are good for your hair, more vitamins must be better – right? Wrong. Taking vitamins in excessive amounts can actually damage your health and your hair.

Too much vitamin C: High doses of vitamin C can cause skin cells in the scalp to reproduce more rapidly than normal, leading to a flaky scalp.

Too much vitamin A: Though rough or dry hair can indicate a lack of vitamin A, excessive amounts of vitamin A can speed up cell reproduction in the hair follicles. This means the hair grows faster and reaches the end of its natural growth phase more quickly. Once a hair gets to the end of its natural growth phase, it falls out. If this is happening more quickly than it should, you won’t be able to replace the fallen hairs with new ones quickly enough and overall hair loss could be the result.

Too much vitamin E: Taking high quantities of vitamin E can prevent your body from absorbing iron properly. This can result in mild anaemia, brittle hair and even hair loss.

Eating Well and Looking Good

For fabulous looking hair, just as for a fit and healthy body, it’s important to eat well and get all those essential vitamins and nutrients. But the key is always to eat a healthy, balanced diet, getting a wide variety of foods and vitamins on a daily basis. High dosage supplements and fad diets can do more harm than good and leave your hair looking more drab than fab.