What truly feeds hair
The quality of the fibre is decided as it is being made, a few millimetres beneath the scalp. What happens there begins on the plate.
There is something we often forget: the hair you style this morning was made weeks, sometimes months ago, a few millimetres beneath your scalp, and whatever was happening in your body at that time is written into it.
That is why a treatment acts on the surface: it protects, it smooths, it repairs. The quality of the fibre itself is decided upstream.
The follicle is a permanent building site
The hair follicle is among the most active structures in the body. It works continuously, day and night, for years on end for a single hair. That activity has a cost: in energy, in protein, in micronutrients.
When the body has to arbitrate (after illness, a severe diet, a pregnancy, a long stretch of stress) it serves the heart, the brain and the muscles first. Hair comes after. That is survival logic, and perfectly healthy.
Hair is the first to register a deficiency and the last to recover from it. It tells you about your previous year, far more than your previous week.
Where the science agrees
Keeping a meal in its rightful place, a few constants come up again and again in the literature.
- Protein. The fibre is made of keratin, and therefore of amino acids. Sufficient protein intake shows in the hair before it shows anywhere else.
- Iron. Its relationship with hair vitality is among the best documented, particularly in women.
- Omega-3 fatty acids. These are associated with scalp comfort, the terrain we talk about least and on which everything depends.
- Vitamin C. It plays a part in collagen synthesis and improves the absorption of plant-based iron. Which is why it is worth bringing the two together in the same meal.
- Water. Less spectacular, and yet: good hydration shows on skin as it does on hair.
The Mediterranean pattern, again
If one dietary model had to be singled out, it would be that one, for a simple reason: it ticks almost everything while staying permissive. Oily fish, olive oil, colourful vegetables, pulses, nuts, fast sugars in small amounts.
It also has a merit that complicated protocols lose along the way: you can keep it up for years. And years are the only horizon that counts, since hair, too, is made over years.