Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on earth. If you turn on Netflix and select a nature documentary like Wild China or BBC’s LIFE, you can hear that bamboo can grow up to a meter a day.
That’s about 1 and a half inch every hour, something you can actually see happen before your eyes.
If only we could adapt the incredible growth rate of bamboo to our hair, especially considering how many millions of people experience pattern hair loss in their lives – 2 of 4 women over the age of 40 and 1 in 3 men over the age of 30.
“Leave” it to the Chinese
Leave it to the Chinese – the undisputed kings of traditional medicine – to do just that.
Bamboo leaf tea is consumed often in the east as a way of slowing hair loss, and promoting hair growth and hair health.
Crushed and strained through hot water, bamboo leaves make the tea taste a little like grass, but that’s hardly a deterrent when compared to how effectively it heals hair.
Bamboo is rich in a mineral called silica. Silica is thought to fortify your skeleton against osteoporosis, strengthen bones, hair, and other keratin-based protein structures.
In fact, bamboo contains more silica than any other plant taken as a medicine or food. And it’s because of the presence of this mineral that hair health experts believe drinking bamboo tea can help your hair grow stronger, fuller, and where it may have stopped growing.
It may not be a meter a day, but it seems to definitely help to varying degrees for various people.
Silica facts for hair health
Silica as mentioned before, is connected to bone mineralization, collagen synthesis, the aging of skin, and the condition of hair and nails.
choline-stabilized ortho-silicic acid is a supplemental source of silica fit for human consumption.
A far cheaper way to introduce more silica into your diet is to drink the aforementioned bamboo leaf tea.
Silica is a very difficult mineral to absorb or find in any bioavailable way. Most of us get our daily value of trace minerals including silica and others from fortified flour products like cereal and bread, followed by fruits and vegetables.
The advantage of bamboo leaf tea as a source of silica is two-fold.
1: Silica is water soluble, so as the bamboo leaves steep, the silica binds to the water molecules and are absorbed sometimes as the water is absorbed into your body.
2: Bamboo is very inexpensive and contains powerful antioxidants as well as other common plant nutrients.
If you’ve tried hair loss formulas before and you haven’t found success, maybe it’s time to do as the pandas do.
After all, pandas have great hair!
