There really are foods that can help your hair grow to look its absolute best! Find out what they are right now!
If your goal right now is to have the most gorgeous locks you could ever have, then it’s time to start focusing on everything you eat and drink.
Your diet plays the #1 most important role in hair health.
Everything you eat can either nourish you or be a burden that your body has to deal with.
If you allow more foods in that nourish you, you tip the scales in favor of healthier hair.
On the other hand, if you eat foods that your body considers harmful – ones like sugar, hydrogenated oils, processed foods, GMO foods – and has to remove or neutralize them, then the amount of energy needed to deal with these foods is diverted from creating healthy hair.
Your choice to eat them is really a choice that is a choice against having long and beautiful hair.
With this in mind, you may consider a diet makeover. From now on, you could eat your own version of a “Healthy Hair Diet”.
7 Types of Foods You MUST Have for Healthy Hair
Below is a list of the foods that will give your hair strength, sheen, thickness, fewer split ends, and the maximum length your hair can genetically attain.
1. Don’t Ever Skimp on the High Protein Foods
The biggest advantage that high quality protein foods have over plant protein foods is their amino acid sequences.
High quality proteins such as chicken, turkey, duck, grass-fed beef, buffalo, pork, lamb, dairy products and eggs have long strings of amino acids that are identified as a perfect match to build certain tissues and organs by your body’s intelligence.
Your hair is composed of a certain string of amino acids and it’s different than what is needed for your nails or your heart.
While eating chicken for example, your body’s intelligence says, “Look – there’s exactly what I need for rebuilding hair.
How nice of her to provide that for me today! I’ll use it!”
When eating plant proteins, a different scenario is occurring.
Your body’s intelligence says, “I need to rebuild hair.
I only have a partial amino acid sequence from lentils here but maybe I can get the rest if she eats some rice…
I can combine them together but I have to put in some work and need the raw materials.”
High quality proteins also provide plenty of sulfur, which lends strength to the hair.
2. High Silica Foods Means Fuller and Longer Hair
There is beauty awaiting you when you consume cucumbers, bell peppers, and parsnips regularly.
These three foods are super high in the element silica.
Many health experts overlook the importance of this mineral, most likely because there’s not a recommended daily allowance for it yet.
However, don’t let this sway you.
Silica is THE MOST IMPORTANT mineral for your hair, skin and nails.
It’s the component that glues together all the connective tissue.
When you start consuming freshly squeezed (juiced) vegetable juices with these three ingredients, a visible difference is seen in your skin overnight.
Hair effects obviously will take longer to see but at the next appointment at the hair salon, your hair stylist will ask you what you are doing to make your hair grow so much faster and thicker.
3. High Biotin Foods Stop Hair Loss
Biotin is an interesting B vitamin.
It was considered as one of the ‘lesser’ B vitamins for the last few decades, to the point where vitamin manufacturers were only adding 33% of the recommended daily allowance to their B complex supplements.
Meanwhile other B vitamins were at levels of 100%, 500% or even 2500%.
Although a deficiency in this B vitamin is supposedly rarely seen, if you have been taking a B complex that is lacking biotin at sufficient levels, you may have unknowingly induced a biotin deficiency.
Whatever is missing from a supplement ends up as a deficiency. And that affects your hair negatively.
Deficiency makes your hair fall out and become thin in diameter. It also makes your hair lose its luster.
Foods high in biotin include eggs, almonds, and avocados.
4. High Iron Foods are Often Overlooked
One of the reasons why hair falls out and loses its color is iron deficiency.
Women are more prone to develop low levels because of their monthly menstrual cycle.
Losing the blood on a monthly basis needs the replacement of iron, yet marketing and the internet will have you believing you don’t even need to be concerned about your iron levels.
Iron is toxic and it shouldn’t even be included in a supplement, some health experts warn.
This is not the case for menstruating women who want bouncy, big hair.
Incorporate foods into your diet such as red meats (grass-fed beef, buffalo, lamb, venison, elk, and pork) and eggs for breakfast to give you a suitable dose of iron daily.
Lentils and spinach are also other good sources. And do make sure your vitamin mineral supplement contains 18 mg for its daily allotment.
5. High Zinc Foods
Zinc is a mineral that allows hundreds of enzymatic reactions to work in the body.
Some of these reactions include ones for hair growth. Years ago when zinc deficiency was discovered, it was hair loss, stunted growth and testicles that didn’t develop that were amongst the first symptoms the researchers found.
You don’t need to have testicles to have a zinc deficiency; hair loss is a good sign that your levels may be low.
Deficiency will cause lowered immunity that leaves your hair follicles open to attack from scalp parasites, bacteria or fungi.
Your hair follicles are strengthened by zinc. Foods highest in zinc include oysters, dark chicken meat, and beef – especially beef liver.
Grains may appear to be high in zinc on the nutrient tables but unfortunately they contain anti-nutrients that will interfere with the absorption of the mineral.
6. High Omega-3 Foods Add Luster to Your Locks
To get your hair to naturally shine, you need omega 3 fats in your diet. Salmon and other fatty fish such as sardines and krill are naturally high in omega 3 fats.
These fats also boost your immunity and decrease inflammation.
7. High Selenium Foods Reduce Dandruff
Selenium is a trace element that is important for your immune system.
Even the American Cancer Association now admits that a selenium deficiency is tied to a susceptibility to develop cancer.
But what they aren’t telling you is that this element is also important for your hair.
Selenium is especially needed for your thyroid gland, which is closely tied to what happens with your hair – how fast it grows, how fast it falls out, and how soon new hairs come in.
Selenium is also an antioxidant that scavenges free radicals in the body.
It thus extends the life of cells – and individual hair strands by quenching these free radicals that attack and strip life from the cells.
Selenium also is an element that is added to shampoo because it has been shown to reduce dandruff.
High selenium foods include Brazil nuts, other nuts (although they aren’t as high as Brazil nuts), garlic, liver, brewer’s yeast, broccoli, brown rice, diary products, molasses, tuna, and chicken.
Donna Schwontkowski
Donna Schwontkowski is known for her practical advice on hair care and is passionate about tracking new hair care methods and hair growth products. She recommends only those brands that she strongly believes can help in effectively resolving your hair problems.
