I Noticed My Hair Is Beginning to Thin. Is This a Sign That Something Else Is Off With My Health?

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I notice my hair is beginning to thin. Is this a sign that something else is off with my health?

Foreign.

This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.

Shea from Facebook asks, I notice my hair is beginning to thin. Is this a sign that something else is off with my health? All right, this is a first here on the Ask the Health Expert podcast. I've got the father of one of our guests who's been on a couple times you all know and love, Dr. Will Cole. Well, now I've got Dr. Bill Cole. His dad is on today to be answering questions for you. So Dr. Bill Cole is, is a functional medicine expert and a health coach. And he is the founder and creator of the key cellular, nutrition and cellular health accelerator programs. And he there, by the way, with a team of more than 30 dedicated health experts educate individuals on the steps needed to start improving their well being. His specialty, release the 40 to 65 year old women market. So I'm like, come on over to the show, Dr. Bill. Also, he has been a competitive bodybuilder, skilled hunter, avid golfer, but for the last 36 years, his biggest passion is natural health and that's been his main focus. So I am super excited to have him with us today. Stay with us. We'll be right back to answer that question.

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It could be a sign that something could be off with your health. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear about thinning hair, especially with women, is that they could have a potential thyroid problem. And generally it's going to be hypothyroid, where they don't have enough thyroid hormone. The way that you would test for that would be a thyroid blood panel. That's one of the symptoms that you'll find with somebody who doesn't have enough thyroid hormones is hair loss. So that would be definitely something that I would want to get checked out right away. Usually there's going to be other symptoms associated with that, things like fatigue, weight gain and such, but certainly a place to start. In addition to that, though, there are other factors that are actually probably more common that we see in my health clinic, in my coaching program, and that is going to be things like stress. We live in a stressful society right now and no doubt it can be accumulated stress that can create that. It can be sudden stress even. I have a story about a young lady who works for me who began working out and she really went from 0 to 60 overnight with her workouts and she noticed one of her symptoms from that was hair loss. So any kind of stress, it doesn't have to be emotional stress, the way that we think of. But also a bigger issue is going to be what we call hormone resistance. You can have adequate levels of thyroid hormone, and about 50% of the people who have thyroid problems will actually test normal if they went actually in and got that blood test. But what's happening is the hormone itself, while it's in the blood, it's there to be tested and they can read it as normal. But if it's not able to get into the cells of the body, then it can't do its job. And that hormone resistance. People have heard of insulin resistance as it relates to diabetes. A lot of people have heard of that. Well, it's not just insulin. It can be thyroid, it can be estrogen, it can be testosterone. Any type of hormone that is being resisted at the cell and it can't get in and do its job. You're going to get symptoms like you don't have enough of those hormones. The reason that we have that is because the cells have become damaged. And when they become damaged, because we eat too much sugar, we have too many bad fats, what I would call denatured fats. Too many toxins in our life, too much stress, not enough quality sleep, nutrient deficiencies, these type of things that I would associ Western lifestyle, if you will. They can damage our cells. When our cell membrane becomes damaged now, it becomes inflamed. When it becomes inflamed, it can actually create a barrier where the hormones cannot be. They're not able to get into the cell. And then you're going to get the symptoms associated with that. What you can do about that is certainly my number one suggestion is going to be getting away from that standard American diet, if you will, getting away from processed foods, too much added sugar, too many bad fats. By bad fats, I mean vegetable oil, corn oil, canola oil, trans fats, hydrogenated oils. We want to shift that over to a whole food diet. We want to be eating whole grain. We want to have foods that are not laden with chemicals, that don't have added sugar, don't have the added bad fats. We want to switch to healthy fats. The biggest single missing ingredient in the standard American diet is healthy fat. Because we've been told fat makes us fat, kills us, gives us heart attacks. Well, bad fats do that. Good fats do the opposite. They'll reduce inflammation. That cell membrane that's damaged is made of two layers of fat, and it's largely cholesterol. So we want to have these healthy fats, wild salmon, grass fed beef, free range eggs, extra virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil. That's going to create a shift in the body that's anti inflammatory and that'll begin the whole process of allowing your body to reverse this cell damage and then allow these hormones in. Now one other thing that I would tell you from a supplement standpoint, there are two things that have been proven really effective in my clinic in terms of hair loss. Number one is an herb called fotai. It is a Chinese herb. It's an adaptogenic herb that has been shown in 2015 actually in a study to activate a gene that is related to hair growth. We've seen moderate to good success with that. Then another thing is bone broth because frankly most of the women that I see, they don't consume enough protein. That can be a real problem as it relates to hair loss. Bone broth is loaded with protein, collagen in particular. And collagen is especially helpful for for our hair and our skin and our nails. So that would be my suggestion.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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