Crash Dieting and Hair Loss

March 20, 2017 | By Dr. Sangay Bhutia (Hair Transplant Specialist in Delhi)

Nowadays, everyone wants a pleasing good looking and appealing personality and for this everyone adopts certain strategies like going to gym, do yoga, do running and alter some diet pattern. All these things let us move forward to a healthy lifestyle and all these things are good when done in limits. Everything in extremes is not good. One of the things, which we do in order to get results quickly, is crash dieting. We need to understand that for every good result there has to be a disciplined process and there are no shortcuts.

Healthy shiny hair reflects one's healthy eating habits and lifestyle. As we need a good balanced diet to maintain good health, our hair also needs nutrients for its health. Crash dieting or avoiding certain foods and nutrients may lead to increase hair fall.

Proteins are essential builders needed for the growth of any tissue and hair shaft is made of keratin, which is a protein, by nature. So one should take adequate amount of protein in diet like 1mg/kg of the body is the rule required for a normal healthy person. Likewise one should not avoid fats also in view of the idea that one may gain weight. Fats are necessary for absorption of certain vitamins like vitamin A, D, E and K.

Vitamins like B1, Niacin, B5 (pantothenic acid), Biotin are essential for hair growth, that means our diet should contain fresh fruits and vegetable in order to have the good source of vitamins. Certain micronutrients like iron, zinc, selenium are required for many enzymatic activities and are an essential ingredient for healthy hair. Deficiency of these cause decrease in quality of hair in terms of texture. Hair becomes brittle and easily breaks off.

Lack of nutrients generally leads to the early entry of hair follicle into resting phase and which also gets prolonged due to nutrition deficiency.

In other words, it is true that one should have healthy eating habits but that doesn’t mean that we should start avoiding foods and devoid our body of essential nutrition. This not only affects the hair but will affect over all body functions.