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“Copper is the crucial element for producing the color in hair and skin, for maintaining the elasticity of skin and blood vessels, for protecting against certain types of free radical, and especially for allowing us to use oxygen properly for the production of biological energy. It is also necessary for the normal functioning of certain nerve cells (substantia nigra) whose degeneration is involved in Parkinson’s disease. The shape and texture of hair, as well as its color, can change in a copper deficiency. Too much iron can block our absorption of copper, and too little copper makes us store too much iron. With aging, our tissues lose copper as they store excess iron. Because of those changes, we need more vitamin E as we age.” -Ray Peat
I have been focusing on the health of my hair for several years now. I started to reverse my gray hair with stinging nettle leaves. I have continued experimenting in reversing my gray successfully with restricting tryptophan, limiting my consumption of grains, especially inorganic fortified wheat and by eating chocolate and liver. Keeping my reactions to stressful situations to a minimum is another strategy and grounding is my counterbalance to that.
Some gray hair wont reverse itself, but all hair follicles have a fairly short lifespan of two to six years, so giving new hair follicles a good start is my strategy for my future hair. I have proved my successes and strategies by pulling out a hair and sharing that proof in my previous “Root Of Gray Hair” thread. A fellow RPF member found nettle to work for him too and posted a pic of a hair from his beard (first photo). I am noticing a lot my hair on other parts of my body have had the grays disappear as well and the hair is getting more abundant in those areas where I want that and the texture is softer too. I yanked a hair off my head the other day to see my recent progress from my last few months of eating like I know I should for my hair and skin and am sharing it in this thread (second photo).
“A Japanese researcher found that each hair color is asso- ciated with a certain pattern of several trace minerals. When he removed all the trace minerals, every type of hair became white. When he added a characteristic pattern of trace miner- als, associated with a particular hair color, to a sample of de- mineralized hair, the color which was produced corresponded to the minerals added, and not to what the original color of the hair had been. He concluded that people inherit a tendency to concentrate certain minerals in their hair.
People who studied the effects of steroids on aging skin found that the steroids which reversed structural age changes in the skin (progesterone, testosterone, pregnenolone) some- times restored hair growth. Occasionally, the hair that grew was pigmented. Estrogen and cortisone accelerated the struc- tural changes of aging in the skin, but their effects on hair were not mentioned. Vitamin A has anti-estrogen effects in skin and other tissues, and part of this effect might result from its ability to promote synthesis of pregnenolone and progesterone.
Physicians have mentioned that a depigmented spot some- times appears in the skin over an area where they have in- jected cortisone. The familiar association of severe stress with sudden greying o f the hair also would suggest that exces- sive cortisone destroys melanin. The average stress caused by a particular climate would probably combine with any other factors that are involved in regions where there is more or less white hair than average.
1 think oxygen wastage is a central event in aging. Just as a cut potato requires oxygen to make melanin, so do our tis- sues. Iron tends to keep accumulating in our tissues with ag-
ing, and iron appears to be a factor in wasting oxygen (especially in age pigment).”
-Ray Peat“When rats were fed a diet completely lacking tryptophan for a short period, or a diet containing only one fourth of the “normal” amount for a more prolonged period, the results were surprising: They kept the ability to reproduce up to the age of 36 months (versus 17 months for the rats on the usual diet), and both their average longevity and their maximum longevity increased significantly. They looked and acted like younger rats. (A methionine-poor diet also has dramatic longevity-increasing effects.)” -Ray Peat
This was something that I read second hand that Ray Peat did….
“…I started getting individual white eyebrows when I was in my 40s and I was thinking about the melanin in the brain of being deficient in Parkinson’s disease and thinking about what happens in that process. I realized that an excess of iron compete against copper and copper is the enzyme that makes the the dark pigment. And too much iron will simply get in the way and knock the copper out of out of your pigment enzymes. And I didn’t want to try it just eating copper. I made a solution
put a penny a real copper penny in a little bottle of water with an aspirin tablet and about half a spoonful of
vinegar. So it had two acidic things to help the solvent. So it was copper aspirinate and copper acetate that I
was using in the solution and I found I put a drop of that on the white here and watched it closely they grow very
very fast. The very next day and very visibly on the second day, I could see black pigment appearing at the root that just essentially an instantaneous restoration of pigment formation.”“Just thinking about, anticipating, sex increases testosterone, makes the whiskers grow faster; general good health keeps the increased testosterone from increasing estrogen and cortisol.” -Ray Peat
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Cari aka "Rinse & rePeat"