Good nutrition helps you maintain a healthy body, and it’s the most critical factor when it comes to a beautiful head of healthy hair. You might be surprised how dramatically nutrition affects your hair growth, its thickness, and how easily it breaks.
The right vitamins and minerals help keep your hair growing, but they also keep hair strong, prevent hair loss, and help grow hair at the fastest rate possible for your age and ethnicity. Many websites will quote six inches as the average rate of yearly hair growth for humans, but that average comes from studies that aren’t diverse and usually fail to include different ethnicities.
However, despite the lack of accurate consensus on how much your hair “should” grow in a year, nutrition does dramatically impact hair growth, no matter your hair type, ethnicity, or age.
Overcoming Nutrient Deficiencies for Healthy Hair Growth
According to an article called “Diet and hair loss: effects of nutrient deficiency and supplement use,” published in Dermatology Practical & Conceptual, the link between nutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and hair follicles is complex.
Nutritional deficiencies may change the structure and speed of hair growth, but scientists have yet to identify a nutritional “silver bullet” for preventing hair problems like loss, breakage, and thinning.
Rather, the key to a healthy head of hair requires a balanced diet and foods rich in B vitamins like Folate, B6, and B12. These vitamins help your body create red blood cells, which are responsible for delivering nutrients to the cells in your body.
Your scalp and hair follicles need serious nutrients for healthy hair growth, and a diet rich in B vitamins helps prevent breakage, shedding, and slow growth. Other nutrients that promote healthy hair include protein, biotin (vitamin B7), iron, vitamin C, and zinc.
The Ideal Foods for Healthy Hair Growth
What kind of foods should you include in your diet for beautiful hair?
A meal with fresh, healthy salmon is an excellent choice. The fish is rich in protein, and its omega fatty acids will help keep your hair beautifully shiny. Pair your salmon with some spinach, which is another nutrient powerhouse that will feed your hair with its vitamin C, folate, and beta carotene. Salmon and spinach also have lots of iron, which is an essential nutrient for preventing hair loss.
If you’re not big on meat or fish, try a handful of nuts. Almonds come loaded with vitamin E, as well as essential fatty acids like fish. Beans are another plant-based option you might try. Black beans help you get your zinc, and they also contain biotin, foliate, and iron. You may also want to add some avocados to your diet. The healthy fats in avocados are ideal for helping to prevent hair loss.
Maintaining healthy hair also requires careful selection of haircare products, particularly when you use a basket full of hair products after a shower. Using bottles of hairspray, dry shampoo, and heat protectants can put your hair through the wringer and mean that your healthy nutritional choices don’t actually keep your hair healthy as it grows.
Selecting the Best Shampoo for Your Hair Healthy Diet
When you adopt a hair-healthy diet, the goal is for new hair to grow in a beautiful, healthy manner, but what do you do about the hair that you’ve already grown? And how do you keep your new hair lustrous and healthy? Good nutrition will help you with your future hair growth, but you may want to choose a shampoo to treat the hair you already have.
Unless you’re thinking about shaving your head (bald is beautiful, after all), you may pair your healthy diet with straight or curly hair products designed to gently cleanse hair and enrich your strands with antioxidants and beta-carotene.
Not only are antioxidants an essential part of growing a thick head of hair, but they’re great for keeping your hair thick and preventing hair loss. In 2021, a randomized controlled trial on the scalp application of antioxidants showed an improvement in the condition of participants’ scalps and a reduction in hair shedding.
The ingredients in your shampoo truly matter to your hair’s health and its appearance. Failure to consider the ingredients in your shampoo may have unfortunate consequences for your scalp.
Creating a Balance in Nutrition and Hair Care
Eating a balanced diet benefits every waking moment we have, but it’s not just the organs inside your body that benefit from a healthy diet. Incorporating a hair-healthy diet into your regimen helps you make the most of the hair care products you use and maintain a healthy outlook and personal appearance.