Your hair and nails are full of keratin protein, so a nutritive diet can help keep them strong. You can eat to help improve hair, skin and nail health.
Rather than reach for yet more beauty products, consider curating your plate! There are some nutrients that do work from within to support our nails, skin and hair.
Vitamin C
It is an important nutrient for hair and nails’ collagen production, a structural protein. It´s shape resembles packs of three toothpicks (triple-helix conformation) in repeated sequence. That´s how collagen forms structure. Without plenty of vitamin C, the collagen would end up as a random folding of the amino acids instead, which cannot give any structure.
Vitamin C is well‑known for its anti-oxidative property, meaning that it protects from oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is one of the leading causes of skin dryness and fragilisation of the nails. The antioxidant property of vitamins C is due to the fact that it protects the cells by eliminating free radicals, which might otherwise harm them.
Biotin, a water-soluble B vitamin, keeps your nails and hair healthy, and is found in egg yolks, almonds, oats, potatoes, avocado, salmon and spinach. Multivitamins often also contain biotin.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
In our quest to attain healthier skin and shinier hair, many of us can end up relying on face creams and hair treatment, when the real order of the day is to eat more Omega-3s, and make them part of your daily diet to create a glow from the inside out and your beauty from within.
Most people think of omega-3 fatty acids as fish oil, and they are, along with oily fish, seeds and nuts. They are often referred to as polyunsaturated fats, because they have one or more double bonds in the carbon chain. Unlike calculations about fat, weight, or daily steps, our bodies cannot synthesise omega-3 fats. We must consume them.
And besides trying to get our omega-3 fatty acid intakes up to the 1 to 2 grams per day mark, we can reduce omega-6 fat intakes that currently occur with most processed vegetable oils (sunflower, corn and safflower), in salad dressings, in many commercial pastries and crackers, and in all sorts of snack foods and fast foods, that are fried in omega-6 laden vegetable oils.
Zinc
Aside from muscle-building benefits, consumers can find zinc in lotions, serums and SPF that claim rare beauty benefits to lush hair and nails.
Zinc is an important micronutrient, a key component of many enzymes but also more broadly necessary throughout human metabolism to support protein folding and expression, and support healthy immune systems and normal growth from infancy through adulthood.
Zinc is a constituent of keratin, the main protein in nails and the component responsible for their strength and flexibility. If there isn’t enough zinc, lacklustre nails, slow nail growth or Beau’s lines (horizontal raised grooves in the nails) could be the outcome.
Vitamin E
This serves primarily to act as an extremely potent antioxidant, quenching free radicals associated with oxidative stress as plasma is the primary location of total maintenance that these molecules operate in plenty are found in dietary sources like seeds and nuts, leafy green vegetables, vegetable oils and supplementation (with plasma being the primary location of total maintenance that these molecules operate in); other forms include all-rac-alpha-tocopherol and dl-alpha-tocopherol.
We know that the fat-soluble form of vitamin E easily penetrates through skin, because many facial gel serums and creams contain it to help protect and repair skin and nails. I’ve found that vitamin E supplies the biggest benefits for nails when applied directly to those two tiny, horizontal layers of nail (the nail plates, separated by the lateral grooves called cuticles). Vitamin E is helpful because another of its uses seems to go almost against nature: it helps to soften dryness. For that reason, it’s a key component of my favourite cuticle oil (cucumber extract, chamomile extract, evening primrose oil and jojoba oil).
Iron
Oxygen-poor hair follicles won’t grow properly in the absence of iron, which can lead to dry, brittle, thinning hair. More specifically, a deficiency of iron causes the nail matrix to shrink in size, leading to brittle, concave, spoon-shaped nails that grow unevenly.
This is as well as heme iron (meat products and animal foods) and nonheme iron (plant foods), which are vital for nail health. Biotin, or vitamin B7, also helps brittle nails by making them thicker. This vitamin is found in peanuts, eggs, Swiss chard and wholegrain foods.
If your nails are brittle, scaly or crumbling, ask your doctor for iron-deficiency testing; ask where the excess might be. Don’t take too much iron – too much leads to haemochromatosis, and watch out for that.
