How To Regrow Your Hair ?
Today we’re going to talk about how to regrow your hair. So whether you are losing hair or your hair is becoming thinner or you have alopecia, this video is for you. I wish I could say there was a magic pill you could just take to regrow your hair, but there’s a couple aspects about this that you need to understand, especially as it relates to your foods and your diet. So what is hair? Hair is protein, right? It’s a type of collagen. And so do we just eat more protein? That’s the question. Well, what is protein? Protein is a bunch of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And out of all the amino acids, there’s one that’s very, very important. It’s called lysine.
Lysine can have a huge effect over whether you grow hair or not. It seems to be one of the most important amino acids, but it can affect the hair in many different ways. The first being making sure your hair is very, very strong and elastic, okay? So how do you get lysine? What foods are high in lysine? Well, not plant proteins or grain proteins. Both of those are very poor sources of lysine. One of the best sources is, you guessed it, red meat. It’s also in eggs. And this is really relevant now because so many people are telling you not to consume red meat. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for the environment. I’ll tell you right now, grass-fed, grass-finished beef is very healthy for your body as well as for the environment.
So we definitely need a quality of protein, right? Something that has high amounts of lysine. but also the quantity, right? How much protein? Are you consuming enough protein? If you’re doing a high quality protein, you won’t need as much. If you’re doing a low quality protein, as in plant-based proteins, you’re going to need a lot more. But with that comes a lot of anti-nutrients, specifically things like phytates, which can block other factors that we’re going to talk about. So on average, I would say if you consumed, let’s say six to eight ounces of protein twice a day, and I’m talking about like red meat, or it could be eggs, it could be other types of protein, that would be sufficient. Another thing that’s interesting about lysine is it helps you absorb iron.
And a lot of people with hair loss are low in iron. Iron is essential for making hemoglobin, it’s in your blood, to supply the oxygen you need in your scalp. One of the big symptoms of anemia is hair loss. So providing your scalp with enough iron so the hair follicles can have the nutrition is very, very important. Lysine will help you absorb it as well. It’s the same food that’s high in lysine. It’s also high in iron, red meat, animal protein, eggs. But when we think of iron, you want to think about everything red, like a red meat versus white meat, like chicken has a little less. It has some, but it’s very, very high in red meat as well as organ meats.
Now, I haven’t left this topic of lysine because there’s a couple of things that you need to know about it. When you go through stress, the demand, the need for lysine goes way up. So if you’re going through a lot of stress and you’re losing your hair, that could just mean you need to increase more protein. And another factor for the absorption of lysine is if you have any type of inflammation in your gut, you have malabsorption, that could be the reason why you’re not absorbing these amino acids. So here this person is eating a lot of grains, thinking they’re good, creates inflammation in the gut because of the gluten and other factors. And then that person can’t absorb amino acids and minerals anymore.
And so now they lose their hair. So your gut is very, very important as well. And this could explain why a lot of people going on the carnivore diet get their hair back. Now, I personally am not on the carnivore diet. I like my vegetables, and I also like my animal proteins as well. But for those people that have gut inflammation, I think they should go on the carnivore for at least a few months because certain properties in that meat will heal the gut. So there is a really interesting connection between your digestive system and your hair. Think of the digestive system as like the roots in the soil. So the plant above the surface is what you can see, and you can see if it’s healthy or not.
Well, in our bodies, the hair is the plant, right? And the roots are in the gut. And this brings up another topic. A gut symbiosis or your friendly bacteria, your gut microbes actually make amino acids. They make certain proteins. And if there’s a disruption of the flora inside, you’re going to have an alteration in the flora on the surface of your scalp, not to mention dandruff and other types of skin disorders. So some people, when they start getting on a probiotic from being on an antibiotic for a start noticing that their hair starts coming back and their hair is thicker. Interesting. So we can’t just look at the body in isolation. We have to look at the whole picture. And many times if you have an overgrowth or some type of fungal overgrowth or whatever on the surface of your skin, the way that you fix it is through the internal gut.
You have to start taking more probiotics or probiotic foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, things like that. Let’s talk about another thing. It’s called DHT. This is a very powerful form of testosterone that has been known to cause a burnout of the hair follicles or even a thinning of the hair. So there’s all sorts of medications out there that inhibit this DHT and help you grow your hair. But of course they come with side effects. So what are some natural DHT inhibitors? Well, a big one is zinc, okay, which happens to be in the red meat again too. So consuming more red meat will actually kill three birds with one stone. But zinc is very, very important in regrowing your hair for other reasons too.
But it does inhibit this DHT problem. But you also have lysine. Lysine itself can inhibit DHT. So getting enough protein, again, will help you from many different areas. You can also do pumpkin seed oil. You can do green tea extract. You can do nettle root. These are all natural inhibitors of this DHT. And if we can reduce that, we can then eliminate that barrier if that’s one of the causes of your hair loss. Now, just as a side note, lysine is the precursor for another molecule called carnitine. And I’ve talked about carnitine in later, very high in red meat, but carnitine shuttles the fats into the mitochondria for fat burning or oxidation. And this is why a vegan might be low in carnitine because they’re low in lysine.
And this is another reason why people seem to get a lot of energy when they consume red meat. Now, another interesting thing that happens when you’re low in lysine is that you might have a tendency to have high triglycerides in your blood for this very reason. There’s low carnitine. To shuttle the triglyceride side into the mitochondria for energy production. Lysine also helps decrease stress because it can help lower cortisol, can help lower your heart rate in recovery. It can help lower the risk of herpes infections, which is to keep this virus in remission. In one study, apparently lysine can help lower glycation in the kidneys of diabetic rats and improving insulin resistance. So this lysine molecule is quite widespread. All right, this leads us to the next topic.
Chronic stress, you could definitely lose your hair with chronic stress. A lot of people go through too much stress and they end up with alopecia, autoimmune diseases, and just general hair loss. Why is this? Because cortisol is a catabolic hormone. It breaks things down and stress activates cortisol. Our bodies were not designed to have this sustained high level of cortisol over a long period of time. So how can we lower cortisol? Lower your stress. And so what you have to know about that is that stress can deplete you of zinc or increase the demand for zinc. And zinc itself can help reduce stress. And just as a side note, you need to really understand what can deplete you of zinc. Sugar, alcohol, and stress.
Other things are really important in reducing stress and also helping your hair at the same time. Vitamin B1. Other B vitamins too, like B5, B12, which can help someone if they have anemia. so you can actually have anemia from a lack of iron and b12 and other things too. Where are you going to get those b vitamins? Nutritional yeast is a good source. But another way that a lot of people are helping their guts, especially if they have leaky gut or an inflamed gut, to fix that, they go in the carnivore for a period of time. So these are just some things that i think you should be aware of and you should try as the most important actions to get back your hair.