Just rub some Magnesium on your head and you won't go bald! ...Okay, it's not that simple, but we wish it were!
Thomas DeLauer breaks down the science behind hair loss and 3 surprising ways of preventing it on the latest #ScienceSaturday.
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Transcript by Rev.com
- Just rub a little magnesium on your head, and you won't go bald. Okay, don't quote me on that, actually what I'm going to talk about here is exactly how hair loss works in the body, and how magnesium and a couple other things could be playing a big role when it comes down to how your body produces hair, and how it preserves it's hair. So you don't go bald.
-So let's go right into the science. You see, it all has to do with DHT. Also known as dihydrotestosterone. Dihydrotestosterone is a metabolite, or derivative, or by-product, of testosterone metabolism. You see, what ends up happening, is whenever we have testosterone, we have a high level of androgenic activity, these androgens combine with something known as 5-alpha-reductase, you're gonna hear a lot about 5AR in this video, so listen up. What ends up happening, is when this 5 alpha reductase combines with androgens, it creates this metabolite testosterone, known as DHT, dehydrate testosterone. This DHT can cross through the bloodline barrier, and cause a lot of chaos throughout the body. But one of the biggest things that it does, and one of the biggest side effects ends up being how it occupies a hair follicle.
-You see, our hair follicles have unique receptors in them, and when DHT flows around, it just so happens to fit right into these receptors in hair follicles. And when they clog one of those receptors, they clog that hair follicle's ability to receive nutrients, to receive minerals, and to ultimately receive the protein that they need to grow a hair. So DHT doesn't cause you to go bald, it essential starves the hair, which is why your hair first starts out by getting thinner, then eventually falls out and doesn't get reproduced. We don't grow new hair, that's why it just stops when you reach a certain age. And what it is, is the cumulative build up of this 5 alpha reductase, reacting with testosterone, causing DHT. We have so many years of DHT that it's clogging the hair follicle.
-So let's get down to how this works in the body a little bit more, and what you can do to prevent it. The first one I wanna talk about is good old-fashioned saw palmetto. Okay, I'm preaching to the choir here, because a lot of people know what saw palmetto is, or they've been told by their doctor at one point or another, that they should take saw palmetto to reduce the enlargement of the prostate. See, that dehydrate testosterone, the whole DHT conversion, that all has to do with the testes, the prostate, even the adrenal glands, to a certain extent. So, a lot of the same things that are affecting DHT, will also affect the prostate. So saw palmetto is going to slow down the production of that 5 alpha reductase, in fact, it actually stops that conversion, or at least, slows it down. It makes it so the androgenic properties of testosterone don't react with the 5 alpha reductase, there by reducing the creation of that DHT. So, less DHT, means less affect on the hair, cause you have less floating around. It's really that simple. So saw palmetto isn't the most exciting one, cause that's the one that you can just google, and probably could have found the answer too.
-There's another one that's even more intriguing, that's starting to get a little more popular here in the last couple of years. This one is known as pygeum. Now pygeum is extracted from the bark of the African plum tree, and pygeum acts on DHT in an entirely different way. See, what pygeum does, is it utilizes a very unique fatty acid structure, to actually penetrate some of the steroid hormones, themselves. We have to remember that steroid hormones, like testosterone, estrogen, all of that, they are fatty acid-bound hormones. They work with cholesterol, okay? So if we have a unique structure of fatty acids, and we could stop the conversion of DHC that way, we actually have an even more affective means of stopping dehydrate testosterone from being created in mass amounts. Saw palmetto is great, but it's kind of ambiguous with how it stops that conversion process. With pygeum, it's a little bit more direct, that unique fatty acid structure slows down the 5 alpha reductase by working with the hormones. So it's proven to have a big, very powerful affect. Even to the point where it's almost as strong as finasteride, which is a pharmaceutical hair regrowth tool.
-And now that leads me into the third thing that you can do to start improving your hair quality, but also, prevent some baldness. And that's good old fashioned magnesium. Remember how I talked about how DHT blocks minerals and nutrients from getting to the hair follicle, well, magnesium is one of the ones that the hair follicle needs the most. If we don't have the right minerals, we don't have the right nutrients, the hair can't grow. Now, additionally, magnesium does a couple of other really interesting things within the body. For one, it's gonna stop calcium build up in the hair follicle. That's right. Calcium is actually going to slow down your hair growth. And it does this because it clogs the hair follicle, calcium is very tough, it's very rigid. And it could clog our arteries, but it could also clog our hair follicles. And since magnesium counteracts calcium in the blood supply, even just in general, it's going to make it so that the hair can grow a lot easier, and not have to deal with the calcified stuff that's crusting up inside your hair follicle. It sounds gross, because quite frankly, it kind of is.
-Now, additionally, magnesium's involved in so many different enzymatic functions within the body, that it's very important for protein synthesis, in the first place. And since our hair is almost entirely protein, it would make sense that we need this magnesium for protein synthesis, in the first place. But there's one big reason why you should be taking magnesium, and it has to do with it's affect on DHT, and for this, I'm gonna reference the nice, south Korean study from 2010, in a study that was conducted in South Korea in 2010, researchers took a look at combining magnesium with threonate, and then combining it with DHT, with certain cultures. While they were looking at some different reactions with paplacells, and looking at different skin cells, but one of the by products of their study was they found that magnesium and threonate had a big affect on DHC, in the first place. You see, it actually repressed the DHT significantly. Meaning, it made it less affective.
-Hormones have a certain life to them. And you can make them more powerful, or you can make them less powerful. While the magnesium and the threonate made it significantly less powerful. And it was believed because it had to do with the affect on the gene expression of something known as DKK1. All that that means, is that it changed the genetic structure of the actual DHT, making it less potent, making it less smaller, making it weaker, so it didn't affect the hair follicle as much, so we have some pretty interesting stuff proving that magnesium does have an affect when it comes down to hormones, now, that's not the end all, be all. That's just one study, but I'm a huge advocate of magnesium in the first place. So if we can understand our hormones, understand the relationship between minerals and our hormones, and also understand what is happening when it comes down to the conversion of testosterone and dihydrotestosterone, we are five steps ahead of everyone else that's just going through life, letting their hormones do whatever they want to do.
-So, as always, Jigsaw land, make sure that you check out the full line of Jigsaw magnesium supplements, and get your hands on some magnesium SRT, this holiday season so that you're not letting the holidays cause so much stress, that it's contributing to your hair loss, as well. I'll see you on the next page
