Alkalising the System

We hear all the time from learned professionals that we need to alkalise our systems to re-balance our acidic diets that cause so many woes in our bodies and in turn affect hair loss.

If I am out having a coffee....pretty acidic and usually around pH5....I tag team it with a bottle of Smart water if I can as it's the only shop bought water I can find with a decent high enough level of alkalinity at around pH9 to balance out that nasty coffee that causes chaos inside on so many levels (more on coffee and women's health in my next blog - OH MY!) and get me back down to around pH7.

Humans are the only species on earth who drink things other than water for thirst and drink not only when they are thirsty - for example a few cocktails or beers at the weekend. There are some great water calculators online that can tell you how much water you should be drinking based on your height and weight, but in general we should be drinking around 2.5-3 litres of water each day to keep the body moving the way it should. And do we...? Many are chronically dehydrated but keep plodding through. Our hair needs our body to be working optimally and it needs that blood to be moving swiftly full of oxygen and nutrients to feed those hungry hair follicles and make that happy hair grow.

Humans are naturally set up to thrive on an alkaline diet and many professors have outlined the benefits to our health and well-being in adhering to this. This goes further than just the food we eat as even stress and poor diet choices can turn our bodies more acidic....and an acidic body is not the best breeding ground for optimum hair health.

Great sources of alkalising power-players we should aim to incorporate into our diets are often those found in hair, skin and nails supplements - for example Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Selenium. It's crazy we need to supplement selenium as we should be able to get all the selenium we need from our diet but less than 45% of us do. This can be due to not eating enough organic vegetables, where they are sourced from, changes in distribution networks, too high a yield being made from crop, soil degradation. So I largely believe we should all supplement selenium if we can't get enough from our diets.

I remember a great idea I once heard about how we could improve our neighbours and own diets for pennies if instead of having 'pretty but useless/unused gardens' if everybody on a street took in on themselves to grow a different vegetable etc...Percy grew carrots, Bob grew cabbages, Bertha grew potatoes and Hank bred the chickens....a real back to basics organic, dirt-loving way of feeding ourselves and children with quality ingredients and not mass-produced and mass-chemical infused products that we often buy in supermarkets. I digress....We can but dream. In reality we just don't want to live that way, we want convenience. We've normalised stress and push ourselves to reap the maximum of each day and don't get the quality sleep we need (and this plays havoc with women's hormones too....that's for another blog post on Lutenizing Hormone).

The foods to be choosing include: fresh leafy greens, 20-30 different vegetables each week, omega 3's, nuts, seeds, pulses, wholegrains, wholefoods....instead of reaching for the cornflakes have actual corn in your diet. Instead of drinking a sugar rich smoothie eat the actual whole fruits. Fresh salads with real nutrients and water content. Ditch the pizzas, microwave meals, fizzy drinks, excess coffees, breads, ice cream, crisps, biscuits, beers, processed foods. We know they aren't healthy so why do we eat them?

I have studied alkaline diets for a while now, part of being a Trichologist is being qualified in nutrition and biochemistry and the science is there for me. We don't live perfect lives but if we can continue making positive changes each day then we can live healthier lives. If we can use diet and sleep to reduce our stress levels, practice good hair and scalp care, rid inflammation in and on our bodies then our hair has a real shot of being the mane attraction again. Food for thought.