Taking Supplements Against Hair Loss

When the subject of supplements for hair loss comes up, my soapbox comes out. I think that supplements and vitamins can be very, very helpful for our general health. There’s no hair loss cure in a bottle, and my concern with a lot of the hair loss supplements that are advertised is that they contain a lot of things such as some herbs that maybe un-tested; they may not go through any kind of rigorous quality control. You don’t know what you are getting.

The other concern is if you are taking a hair loss vitamin formula and then you are also taking say your own multivitamin formula and then possibly you also have a stress formula, you are taking a lot of stuff and putting a lot of stuff in your body, and you may be overdosing on certain things. There are certain vitamins that are considered hair loss vitamins -- biotins, folic acid, vitamin A.

Vitamin A is the one that you can take too much of and you can overdose on it and it can cause some unwanted problems. Biotin and folic acid are basically B vitamins. They may not hurt you, but what’s interesting is when you look at the side effects of almost everything, one of the side effects for biotin, which is supposed to be the hair loss king, can be hair loss. So if you take too much of the thing you might need to help your hair loss, you might cause your hair loss.

So I always cautioned people to, it’s not going to hurt you to take a supplement. It’s not going to hurt you to make sure that you are keeping your vitamin intake optimal. We should probably all be doing that either from our food sources or taking a very good multivitamin, but you need to be careful and research was out there. And I have on my website, I went through one hair loss supplement that’s very widely advertised and I went through and put down the side effects of every single ingredient in that vitamin and I think that’s another way of advocating for yourself.

Before you take something that may or may not help, look at the ingredients. It’s easy to go on the internet; do a Google search, look at the side effects, what they are usually used for, what they can cause, and then also make sure there’s a good quality control. Don’t buy over the internet if it’s from some company you have never heard of. Do your research so you know what you are getting. And then, above all, when you go into your physician, let him or her know that you were also taking supplements because they can interact with other drugs that you are taking.

If you are taking, say for instance, some hypertension drugs, you may find that certain vitamins should not be taken with them or they could exacerbate the effect of the vitamin or vice versa -- the vitamin can make the medication stay in your body too long so you could end up getting in an overdose of the medication.