How Can a Poor Diet Affect Your Hair – 2024 Guide

If your hair looks dull, lifeless and brittle and you are already using a large number of hair products, perhaps you should explore your diet.

What you eat matters. It reflects your overall health and if you eat poorly, you will notice it on your skin primarily and also on your hair. Even though you may rush to buy some high quality products for your hair immediately after you notice some issues, perhaps you should consider modifying your diet first.

Because, why would you spend all this money on hefty hair care products and fancy shampoos if that’s not the issue?

In this article, we are going to talk more about the correlation between your hair and your diet and what can you do to improve both!

Potential Hair Problems that Can Be Caused by Poor Diet

First of all, we are going to list the most common hair problems that poor diet can trigger. If you have any of these problems, changing your diet might be the solution.

Hair Loss

I most cases, hair loss is tied to your DNA. If your parents and grandparents started losing their hair while they were young, this will probably be your faith too. And there’s not much that you can do about it.

However, you can definitely slow it down by eating healthy food. Let’s get down to more specifics:

Healthy Scalp

For starters, you need to keep your scalp clean and healthy. And you will do so by drinking more water than you are now. We are all constantly told to drink 8 glasses of water a day for a reason. This isn’t as silly as it sounds. It is essential to keep your body hydrated all the time and water’s all we need.

You cannot replace water with juices, Coca-Cola, coffees, etc. Sure you can drink coffee, tea or a natural fruit juice in addition to water, but water should be your primary liquid.

That’s not enough though. You need to check some basic vitamins such as Vitamin A, C and E. While there’s always an option of getting these vitamins separately, you can easily increase their intake because they can be found in fish oil, leafy greens and citrus fruits.

And speaking of citrus fruits, drinking lemonade or lemon water is great way to hydrate and increase that Vitamin C intake. If you are curious to learn more about hair health and some other principle, regarding hair care, Health Keeda is the place to go.

Hair Shaft

For a healthy hair shaft, you will need a whole set of vitamins in the B spectrum with the most important being B-12, B-5 and B-6. If you can get a hold of at least one of these, that’s better than nothing.

Again, if you are not a fan of taking the vitamins in form of pills, these vitamins are contained in whole grains, egg yolk and a large number of vegetables.

This is great news for someone who is already eating this. They are great in preventing hair loss! In the meantime, you can always try some hair extensions, but, be sure to choose only high-quality products and avoid really bad hair extensions.

Brittle Hair

In order to prevent your hair from damaging, you need to do all of the above + drink your coffee and teas!

In addition to that, carbohydrates play a great role in keeping your hair healthy. Carbs are often overlooked in our diet and some diet plans such as Keto even eliminate all carbs. This has its benefits, but it is better to take the good carbohydrates than not take any.

These include whole grain toasts, whole grain cereals, peas, rice, oatmeal, etc. Of course, we don’t mean for you to eat half a chocolate a day. In fact, you should avoid processed sugar, which is really bad, not just for your hair, but overall health.

We’ve given you a fairly clear guide on some of the most common problems regarding your hair – brittle hair and hair loss, but now let’s take a closer look on some of the most important vitamins for your hair health. The reason we have not mentioned dandruff is because a lot of people have it and it usually requires something other than diet to fix this problem, like a good shampoo – but this also depends on an individual.

Vitamin A and Selenium

The two most important vitamins for your hair health are Vitamin A and Selenium. Before we get started with these two, it is important to say that you shouldn’t take more than it is suggested because it can have some negative effects on your body, which you don’t want.

In fact, too much Vitamin A can cause hair loss and not prevent it! It can also thin out your hair and make it brittle. Therefore, you may want to consider avoiding the pills and getting all your vitamin A from food. There’s no reason to supplement it because we don’t need it in high quantities, but it is essential for our hair health.

We’ve already mentioned some of the best foods that are rich with Vitamin A, but what about Selenium. The best way to get it is to eat Brazil nuts, seafood and organ meats. Just like it is the case with Vitamin A, you shouldn’t take too much of Selenium either because in high quantities it can have a reverse effect.

Use high-quality products too

This is more or less that you should know about the correlation affects your hair health. If you are eating poorly, you will definitely lose your hair more quickly and make it thin and brittle. With healthy diet, some of your problems regarding your hair will definitely be solved.

However, to increase the effects, we suggest that you find hair products that will further help your maintaining your way properly. Just like you can damage your hair with poor diet, you can do so with questionable and low-quality shampoos, hair colors and hair sprays.

Find the products which are suitable for your hair and your wallet, make sure you have a healthy diet and drink a lot of water. This is what it takes to keep your hair healthy!