Today let's talk about two really important things to prevent premature graying of your hair. Now if you look at my hair at the top—okay, all this is natural—of course, you can see, let's see on this side, a little gray right here, a little gray right here. There is a factor of age, and eventually, everyone will have gray hair, but the whole goal of this video is to show you how to prevent the premature graying of your hair. So many people are getting gray hair just way too early. It's not all genetics.
Genetics do play a part, but there's also something called epigenetics, which are things that you can do which are above your genes. So even though you might have genes that give you a propensity to get gray hair, there's a lot of things that you can do about it. But there's two really important things you need to know. One is the actual pigment in the hair that gives you the coloring, and the enzymes to allow that pigment to occur are dependent on a trace mineral called copper. If you are deficient in copper, you might have a tendency to get gray hair prematurely.
But why are people deficient in copper? Yes, it could be coming from your diet because you're not consuming high-copper foods, which I will talk about shortly. But there's another thing that you need to know. High levels of cortisol, as in stress, deplete copper, because cortisol uses a lot of copper enzymes. So in other words, more stress equals more demand for copper equals more loss of copper. And when you run out of copper and you don't have enough enzyme—that enzyme is called tyrosinase—to make this melanin to keep your natural color in your hair, things start to go gray.
So how does this apply to you? Well, stress. You've probably even experienced—the more stress that you have, the more gray hairs you might find in your head. So, of course, the solution is to do whatever you can to reduce stress. But in the meantime, as you're doing that, there's other things you can do to increase copper, like eat more foods higher in copper. I don't necessarily recommend taking a copper supplement by itself. I recommend that you try to get it from the foods. However, you could take a copper supplement, but you have to make sure that it also has other trace minerals, especially zinc in there, because zinc and copper work together. You never want to just take a standalone trace mineral with copper. And the ratios need to be correct too. You usually need like a 1 to 10 ratio—one copper to ten zinc. So in other words, you don't want to take a lot of copper, you just want to take sufficient amounts.
Now before we get into the foods for that, let me just explain this other thing that's equally as important, and that is basically age—the aging process. What happens when you age? You get this accumulation of hydrogen peroxide that builds up in the hair shaft. Hydrogen peroxide causes a bleaching effect of your hair. So the other question is, okay, how do you slow down the aging process? Well, you'd want to slow down the accumulation of hydrogen peroxide to at the very least keep the color in your hair.
There is an enzyme that naturally breaks down hydrogen peroxide very quickly actually—it's called catalase. But before you go out and buy another supplement with catalase, I don't recommend that. I recommend eating foods high in catalase, which I'll explain in a minute. But let me just first explain a little bit more about catalase because it's very interesting. Catalase breaks hydrogen peroxide down into water and oxygen. One molecule of catalase can break down a million molecules of hydrogen peroxide in less than a second. So by having enough catalase in your body, you can slow down this hydrogen peroxide phenomenon that occurs with aging.
As one side note—your immune system uses hydrogen peroxide. The white blood cells use hydrogen peroxide as a weapon against pathogens. So if you have this low-grade infection, or—you know—a lot of times people have chronic fatigue syndrome, they have this like Epstein-Barr virus or some type of herpes virus that kind of keeps coming out of remission, in remission, that type of thing. That can be releasing a lot of hydrogen peroxide. So having a healthy immune system is really important.
So number one: we need to lower our stress as well as increase the copper to build the enzyme to keep the pigment in your hair. And then over here, we need to increase catalase to keep this hydrogen peroxide as low as possible.
So what are the foods that are highest in copper? All of the seafoods. Shellfish, especially oysters, are very important. Secondly, mushrooms—eating more mushrooms—they have that copper-based enzyme tyrosinase. And by the way, you can also get copper in organic grass-fed beef liver. And if you're vegan, you can also get it from spirulina. So that’s those foods.
Now what about foods that can increase catalase? You can get catalase from grass-fed beef liver, vegetables—especially cruciferous vegetables—and sprouts or microgreens are loaded with catalase. So when you have your salad each day, make sure you add some microgreens or some sprouts. That way, you can get a little bit more catalase. And of course, if you're having a salad, maybe you do arugula as your base because that’s a cruciferous. And then you can also sauté—but not overcook—other cruciferous vegetables.
And of course, on top of all that, you want to work on your stress. You want to do things—exercise to release stress. You want to also maintain a stress-free attitude about life and not get too serious and stuck in stress. You want to avoid smoking, alcohol, junk foods, sugars, refined carbs.
And one more point about catalase—I found one study that showed that you don’t want to go low-fat. A higher-fat diet can help increase catalase, as in the ketogenic diet. So we keep coming back to this healthy version of the ketogenic diet that I keep recommending, where you're doing nutrient-dense foods, where you're doing cruciferous vegetables, where you're doing grass-fed meats, and even organ meats. And if you don’t like organ meats, you can always get those in the supplement.
And one last real interesting point about catalase—I found another research study on mice (so if you have any pet mice this could apply) that found when they stimulated the gene for catalase, there was a significant increase in lifespan. Which is interesting—which would make sense because catalase works on your mitochondria and it's an antioxidant. And too much hydrogen peroxide can create a lot of free radical damage and destroy the mitochondria.
So now that we covered the premature graying of the hair, let's talk about the hair in general. Is there other things that can make your hair healthier? And the answer is yes. In this video, you can find out.
