This is a YouTube video titled "Dave Asprey The Real Culprits Behind Hair Thinning and Loss" featuring Dave Asprey, a host and author, discussing the various causes of hair loss including stress, hormone levels, and toxins. The content provides an informative talk on understanding hair loss mechanisms and potential approaches to address them, recorded in February 2021.
Dave Asprey Host of Bulletproof Radio New York Times Author Founder of Bulletproof Coffee that kind of thing. And there's a few things you might want to know about hair loss. There's three groups of people. There's people who are young and sort of thinking, it's not going to happen to me. There's people who are in the middle of it going, oh my God, I just found a handful of hair. What is going on with this? It doesn't look the way I want it to look. And there's people who are saying, my hair is super thin or it all fell out. What do I do with this? And it turns out there's different things you can do for each of those. But if you're in that final category, it's harder to come back. And if you're in any of these categories, what matters most is actually what's going on in your gut and your toxin exposure, because those affect your metabolism, they affect your cortisol levels, they even affect your hormone levels. And it's not one thing that causes hair loss. It's a bunch of different things that stack up. And one of them is the energetic pathways, the mitochondria. And another thing is hormonal. And if you think it's just one or the other, or you think it's genetics, you're probably going to get it wrong. You've got to get all three of those things lined up well enough and you can do it with diet, with supplements, and a lot of it by avoiding the bad stuff. So if you're one of those people who has lots of hair coming out all at once, well, here's what's going on. You have an issue with short term stress, most likely if it just started happening. In other words, if you, it's going to stop if you recover. So what it comes down to for you is you've got to actually take time to support your adrenal glands and to recover from a burst in cortisol. If you have a different problem where it's just always falling out, you probably want to look more at your hormone levels and your thyroid levels. Because if your thyroid hormones are low, guess what? Your hair is likely to start falling out. In fact, it'll probably do that more so than if you got an issue with testosterone or sex hormone binding globulin, which can be for the third group of people where you want to look at your hormone levels. So is it a short term stressor, is it a long term stress that you need to recover from? Or is it just getting down to you've got some hormones going on? A lot of people think that testosterone causes hair loss, and that is not true. In some people, testosterone converts to something called DHT or dihydrotestosterone, which can cause hair loss. However, having extremely low levels of DHT probably isn't normal either. So if you have testosterone, whether it's supplemental or just your normal stuff, and you have hair loss, you can test your levels of DHT and see if that's actually what's going on. In my case, I actually don't make lots of DHT from my testosterone, so I'm probably safe from that pathway. But that doesn't mean that other things like thyroid hormones or toxins or metabolic irregularities couldn't affect hair. So you can get off the idea that testosterone causes hair loss. It doesn't. However, whether you're a man or a woman, if you have a relatively high amount of testosterone and it converts to DHT and it's one of the problems in your hair, it can be a cause, but it's not the cause.
