M a x i m i s e H a i r G r o w t h
Eat only the best quality, chemical-free, vegetarian diet possible...
Last updated: 20th February, 2021
The health and growth of your hair depends to a large extent on the quality of your diet – the foods you eat on a daily basis. Hair is a physical media and the scalp in which it’s rooted is physical in nature also. Your hair and your scalp are constructed from the macro and micro nutrients that you supply to your body through the food you eat. The better the quality of the food you eat, the healthier your scalp and your hair will be and the faster your hair will grow.
A long time ago, in 1998, I realised that if I wanted to achieve optimal health, I would have to commit myself to ingesting the freshest and most chemical-free food I could get my hands on. Consequently, I don’t eat any processed foods except for those for which some form of processing is unavoidable, such as milk and bread.
My key strategy is to obtain the freshest and best quality food I can, bearing in mind that food is nowhere near as nutritious today as it was fifty years ago. For me, vegetables are vitally important, as is eating the broadest range of vegetables I can on a daily basis. I’m a vegetarian, partly because I’m too lazy to buy and cook red meat. However the main reason that I’m a vegetarian is that cows and other edible animals, that end up on people’s dinner plates as red meat, are herbivores which gain their nutrition from plants. Therefore, in eating red meat, the nutrition that a person obtains from the meat really finds its origin in the plants that were eaten by the former cow, now sitting on that person's plate. Any nutritional goodness in the cow comes from the plant matter that the cow ate during its life. Therefore, you may as well just be a vegetarian and obtain your nutrition direct from the source – plants, like whole grains, vegetables and fruits.
In contrast, I don’t believe that eating red meat is an efficient or effective way to provide the body with the nutrients it needs. The human body has to work a lot harder to digest red meat than it does to digest whole grains, vegetables and fruits. It can extract the nutrients from whole grains, vegetables and fruits during digestion much more efficiently and more effectively than it can extract the nutrients from red meat. Additionally, there are serious issues surrounding the processing of meat at the slaughterhouse which give rise to the risk of the growth of bacteria in the meat which can be harmful to the eater of the meat.
You can overcome issues of iron deficiency associated with vegetarianism by cutting up a handful of parsley on a daily basis and eating it with your dinner. Parsley is extremely good for your health and a great source of iron. However, it may not even be necessary to consume parsley daily, because iron is also supplied by whole grains, such as in the muesli you can eat for breakfast.
You can overcome issues of protein deficiency associated with vegetarianism by eating one to three free-range eggs raw each morning for breakfast and by consuming one to three scoops of whey protein each day. As a male over six feet in height, it’s important for me to obtain adequate protein in my diet and it’s difficult to achieve this without consuming whey protein each day, which is an excellent source of protein and which is instantaneously digestible.
The food you eat must be as chemical-free as possible. Any damage to your body, as a result of adverse chemicals in the food you eat, will have to be repaired by your body's defences, as supplied by your nutrition, or left unrepaired if your nutrition is inadequate to supply your body's defences. Therefore it’s better to eliminate these chemicals from the food you eat to the maximum extent possible and subsequently eliminate the resulting damage to your body to the maximum extent possible. This enables your body to assimilate the nutrients you supply to it via your diet for optimal use in building your body or repairing any existing damage.
Obtaining the very best quality fresh food pays huge dividends for your health. For example, fruits and vegetables that look alive are much better for you than fruits and vegetables that look dead. Picking out the best-looking specimens at the store will lead to vastly superior results for your health than just picking out fruits and vegetables at random. If you find that the place you’re shopping at for fruits and vegetables seems to only sell low quality produce, then it’s really time that you found a better place to shop. They’re probably buying the low-grade produce at the market in order to try to make a larger profit when they sell it. There’s high-grade produce available at the market as well. You just need to find a store that sells that and shop there. Your body will thank you for it.
Eating a diverse range of fresh foods each day is the key to bolstering your body's defences, its ability to repair damage and its general health. The benefits that you obtain from each individual food combine together synergistically to provide total benefits for your body that far outweigh the sum of the individual benefits. This is the critical key to a holistic strategy for optimal health. Synergy is what provides massive leverage on the effort and cost involved in making sure all the components of your nutrition are of the highest quality, by delivering benefits to your body that far outweigh this effort and cost.
My health is maximised by having a laid-out schedule of what I’ll eat and when, on a day by day basis. Not only does this provide my body with predictability, since it then knows what nutrients to expect, but it makes it easier to shop since eating and shopping becomes totally mechanistic. Of course, this doesn’t appeal to everyone. My point in providing a hypothetical daily diet below is primarily to demonstrate the range of high-quality foods that can be consumed on a daily basis. Diversification is the key to using fresh food to repair the body, build the body, fight disease and prevent disease. Diversification leads to synergy which leads to powerfully positive results. If you follow a diet like the one below closely for twelve months, you’ll become a different person because a large percentage of the cells in your body are replaced each year.
5:00 am – Wake up.
6:05 am – One 30 gram scoop of whey protein (containing 24 grams of protein) mixed with reverse osmosis purified water.
6:05 am to 6:55 am - Exercise.
6:55 am – Breakfast comprising two half-pint cups (250mL cups) of muesli, three half-pint cups (250mL cups) of milk and three free-range eggs, consumed raw after mixing them in a cup. (Milk is an important source of calcium which is necessary for the health of one’s bones and teeth. Therefore, it’s important to consume sufficient milk on a daily basis.)
It’s well worth obtaining the highest-quality, most natural muesli you can find, that contains the widest range of whole grains such as rolled oats, rolled barley, rolled wheat and other natural ingredients such as sunflower seeds, papaya, puffed rice, linseeds and puffed corn. A wide range of ingredients leads to synergistic benefits. Whole grains have much more nutritional goodness than refined or processed grains, which have been stripped of their outer husk. To eat refined or processed grains is to sell oneself far short.
I used to consume soy drink with muesli for breakfast until I realised that I was selling myself down the river because soy drink contains little calcium, making it difficult to achieve my required daily intake (RDI) of calcium of 1000 mg (ie. 1 gram) as an adult. So I switched back to having milk on my muesli. 750 mL of milk each day for breakfast provides a whopping 879 mg of calcium each day. You can drink one cup of 250 mL of milk and pour the other two cups of 500 mL of milk on your breakfast.
The recommended daily intake of calcium for various ages is as follows:
Adequate daily intake of calcium is absolutely critical for maintaining the strength of the bones throughout your body, as well as the strength of your teeth. It seems to be virtually impossible to attain the required daily intake of calcium of 1000 mg without consuming milk, which supplies about 293 mg of calcium per 250 mL of milk.
The remainder of the recommended daily intake of calcium can be obtained by consuming one to three 30 gram scoops of whey protein each day, providing 120 mg of calcium per scoop. Together with 750 mL of milk each day, providing 879 mg of calcium, this routine provides a total of 999 mg to 1119 mg of calcium each day. Calcium from any other source in one’s diet is a bonus.
Regarding the eating of eggs for breakfast, free-range eggs are vastly superior in quality to eggs produced from battery hens, which are cruelly confined in crowded cages. These oppressive conditions take away the dignity of these beautiful and valuable creatures and brutally limit their quality of life. I wouldn’t eat any eggs other than free-range eggs. It feels good to eat eggs that have come from chickens that are allowed to roam free in the field as opposed to chickens that are kept cruelly incarcerated in cages indoors. Given the inferior conditions that battery hens endure, it’s no surprise that the eggs they produce are of inferior quality.
I break the eggs into a measuring cup, remove the unsightly parts with a spoon, stir them up with a spoon and literally drink them raw. It takes much less time to consume the eggs this way than to boil them and it’s easier to digest them by literally drinking them from a cup than by eating them after they’ve been boiled. Eggs contain protein and folate, which are both good for the maintenance of muscles in your body and for the health and growth of your hair.
10:00 am - Mid-morning snack comprising one banana. It’s very important to include fresh fruit in your diet each day in order to eat a diversity of foods that lead directly to powerfully good health.
12:20 pm - One 30 gram scoop of whey protein (containing 24 grams of protein) mixed with reverse osmosis purified water, which is a substitute for tuna on bread.
12:30 pm - Lunch comprising four pieces of bread and one cut-up tomato. If you obtain nutritious, multi-grain bread that’s free of added chemicals and which tastes delicious, you won’t find it so hard to eat bread plain. It’s what people have been doing for thousands of years!
If you find that you’re still quite hungry after eating four pieces of bread, then you’re probably a very active person who is exerting a lot of energy throughout the day and who therefore requires a larger intake of carbohydrates to provide the energy you need.
You can increase your intake of bread for lunch beyond four pieces per day, such as by eating six pieces. It’s important to simply bear in mind that this number of pieces of bread that you eat for lunch is one of the most significant variables that’s going to influence whether you develop excess stomach fat or maintain the lean stomach that everybody prefers for themselves.
The cause of excess stomach fat is the excessive consumption of carbohydrate-rich foods like bread and brown rice on a daily basis. Carbohydrates are what the body burns to produce the energy it needs. However, if a person is consuming too many carbohydrates and not burning them through physical and mental activity on daily basis, they’ll be converted to fat and stored on one’s body in places such as the stomach, arms and legs.
3:00 pm - Mid-afternoon snack comprising one apple. It’s very important to include fresh fruit in your diet each day in order to eat a diversity of foods that lead directly to powerfully good health.
5:00 pm - One 30 gram scoop of whey protein (containing 24 grams of protein) mixed with reverse osmosis purified water.
6:30 pm - Dinner comprising whole-grain brown rice, a variety of steamed vegetables, such as potato, carrot, beans, zucchini, broccoli and pumpkin, and a variety of garnishes such as tomato, Spanish onion, mushroom, avocado and celery.
It’s very important to eat whole-grain brown rice as opposed to white rice, which has had the husk removed and is therefore nutritionally inferior. The Japanese navy fleet switched their food supply from brown rice to white rice way back in some early time like the 1600s. However, the crew started getting sick because the husk contains a lot of nutritional goodness that they were missing out on. So they changed their diet back to whole-grain brown rice and their problems with illness went away.
It’s important not to use rice cookers to cook rice unless the inside of the bowl inside the rice cooker is stainless steel and not Teflon-coated aluminium. I thoughtlessly used a rice cooker with an aluminium bowl covered with a Teflon coating on its inside for years and years, before I recently realised that the Teflon is probably leaching into the rice and that the aluminium is definitely leeching into the rice through tiny cracks which soon develop in the Teflon coating. The intake of aluminium has been shown conclusively to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which is basically dementia.
Whichever way you cook the rice, it’s vitally important that you use reverse osmosis purified water to cook the rice in, as with all cooking. Otherwise, if you use tap water, or poorly filtered water, the chemicals and impurities in the water such as chlorine will be readily absorbed by the rice while it’s cooking and you’ll end up ingesting these impurities when you eat the rice, so that your body will be damaged by them.
The healthiest way to cook rice is to use a large stainless steel pot on the stove. You can drill four evenly-spaced 1/8 inch (3mm) diameter holes in the lid to allow the steam to escape while the rice is cooking in order to prevent the water from boiling over and making a mess on the stove. You can also weigh the lid down with some kind of weight. Cooking the rice in this manner will still result in some mess on the stove but it will be minimised.
A good-sized stainless steel pot to obtain is one which can hold 5 quarts or 4.5 litres of water and which has an internal diameter of about 8.5 inches (about 22cm) and an internal height of about 5.5 inches (about 14cm).
You just need to work out how much water you need to use to cook the rice. I cook about 9 ounces (275 grams) of rice in about 0.9 quarts (1 litre) of reverse osmosis purified water. I turn the stove up to the highest setting when I start cooking the rice. It takes about 30 minutes to cook this quantity of rice in this quantity of reverse osmosis purified water. The rice has finished cooking just before all the water in the pot has evaporated. This provides two servings of rice for one person for two dinners. The second serving can be put in a freezer bag and put in the fridge until it’s eaten the next night for dinner.
You can obtain an inexpensive digital timer with an alarm on ebay.com in order to ensure that you don’t cook the rice for longer than the required time, which would result in the rice drying out after all the water has evaporated.
After the rice has finished cooking, you can cool the rice down so that it isn’t too hot to eat by filling the stainless steel pot containing the rice with cold reverse osmosis-purified water and letting it sit for a couple of minutes before draining the water out. It’s important to do this immediately after the rice has finished cooking so that it doesn’t dry out as a result of the enormous amount of heat it contains.
The only real caveat for a dinner like this is not to eat too much brown rice, which is a rich source of carbohydrates. Eating too much brown rice means that it will go straight to your stomach as fat while you sleep if you do. For an adult, two-thirds of one half-pint cup (250 mL cup) of brown rice grains is enough rice for a dinner like this. You obtain the rest of the energy you need from all of the other vegetables and ingredients, which are also very rich in nutrients. The other reason it’s important not to eat too much rice for dinner is that you don’t want your body to have to work too hard to digest it while you’re sleeping. This is meant to be the time that your body is at rest, so you don’t want it to have to work furiously to digest a massive dinner that you’ve eaten.
By preparing and eating a wide range of vegetables for dinner, you’ll be consuming a fantastic range of nutrients each day that will have a noticeably positive effect on your health. Most people don’t eat enough vegetables each day, which is why most people’s skin becomes dry and leathery to varying degrees. Many people are simply unaware that eating a wide range of vegetables on a daily basis is the indispensable component in one’s diet for achieving a healthy glow in one’s appearance, arising from soft and silky skin.
I recommend that you consume potato, carrot, beans, zucchini, broccoli and pumpkin on a daily basis, except for Saturday. Here are the optimal quantities of these vegetables for an adult male to consume each day:
If you’re prepared to exert the extra effort, you can add spinach and Brussels sprouts to the potato, carrot, beans, zucchini, broccoli and pumpkin that I recommend you cut up and steam. However, just these six different types of vegetables alone will provide you with fantastic health benefits, so there’s no need to go to the extra trouble of adding in spinach and Brussels sprouts, especially since spinach is quite time-consuming to prepare. Having said that, you should be aware that spinach is unbelievably good for you, so any time you spend preparing it will pay handsome dividends when you eat it. It’s also extraordinarily delicious.
It’s very important to wash all of these vegetables in purified water, even if it’s just under a carbon block filter that you keep on your kitchen bench with a faucet to dispense the water. From the time that these vegetables are grown, harvested and handled, through to the time they eventually reach you at the store, they can accumulate an array of contaminants, such as pesticides, that are worth taking the trouble to wash off. It’s a good habit to get into. For the beans, once you’ve cut up them up so that they’re ready to be steamed, you can stir them around in a stainless steel saucepan containing purified water in order to clean them. Or you can do what I do, which is to put them into an new, unused, clear, plastic freezer bag, designed to store food, fill it with reverse osmosis purified water, seal the bag by twisting it and clean them by sloshing them around in the bag with the water. One then opens up the bag by untwisting it, drains the water and removes the beans.
In pursuing optimal health and the optimising of your body's ability to repair damage and fight disease, it’s useful to have an aggressive approach of purposely extracting the maximum nutritional goodness from the food. For anyone who doesn't know how to cook, like me, this is good news. Vegetables are best steamed in a stainless steel steamer for the least time possible until they’re just soft enough to eat, to ensure that the vegetables retain as many nutrients as possible. Boiling vegetables, instead of steaming them, causes a much higher percentage of the vegetables' nutrients to be leached into the water in which they’re boiled and lost.
Additionally, if vegetables are boiled in tap water, then they’re directly absorbing highly significant volumes of tap water into themselves, with all the attendant impurities and chemicals, such as chlorine, fluoride and heavy metals, which are then eaten and digested into the body to cause damage which must either be repaired or left unrepaired. It’s very important to cook using reverse osmosis purified water, even when you steam vegetables, otherwise harmful impurities from the water are readily absorbed into the food and make their way into your body when you eat it. It makes much more sense to eliminate these harmful impurities altogether so that your body doesn’t have to deal with them when you eat the food.
Aluminium cookware should absolutely be avoided because it will cause aluminium to leach into the water that you’re cooking with and then into food being cooked with that water. You end up ingesting this aluminium into your body when you eat the food. Aluminium intake is very harmful to your health and has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease (ie. dementia) and insomnia. Stainless steel cookware is the best cookware to use because it’s chemically inert and completely safe.
Once you’ve finished steaming the vegetables, they’re going to be too hot to eat straight away. You can cool them down and make them ready to eat right away by letting them sit in cold, reverse osmosis purified water. Cool the saucepan down that was used to hold the boiling water that steamed the vegetables by filling it with cold, reverse osmosis purified water and sloshing it around. Transfer the vegetables that have just been steamed into this saucepan. Next, fill the saucepan containing the vegetables up with reverse osmosis purified water and let them sit for a minute or two in order to cool down. Drain the water out, which has heated up as a result of the heat from the vegetables transferring to the water. Repeat this process if the vegetables are still too hot or warm for your liking.
You can greatly amplify the nutritional value of this dinner of vegetables and brown rice even further by adding the following delicious garnishes on top of it, after cutting them up:
The nutritional value of these delicious garnishes almost makes them a meal in themselves. Once you add these on top of your dinner of vegetables and brown rice, you won’t be able to wait to eat it. You can top it off with a couple of splashes of soy sauce, if you like, to make it even tastier. The whole thing is a mouth-watering delight. Just be sure to chew your food properly so that your body can digest it effectively and make the best use of all the nutrients it contains. It’s also well-worth drinking some reverse osmosis purified water ten minutes prior to sitting down to eat, so that your stomach will have the fluids in it that it needs to digest a meal like this. This is a good rule to follow before everything you eat throughout the day. After you’ve finished eating, it’s important to wait forty minutes before drinking water again, so that you don’t dilute the digestive processes that are underway in your stomach.
A dinner like this is all about a diversified array of foods. People today are fighting a wide range of persistent health hazards; they’re leading demanding lives which take a toll on their bodies and they want to maximise their health and vitality, so they need the wide range of foods and nutrients that this dinner contains. Do you think that if you eat this dinner every night then your health will change for the better? Of course it will! You’ll become outrageously healthy, because your body will use the time you spend sleeping to utilise all of the nutrients in this dinner to repair your body and build up its vitality. You’ll wake up in the morning raring to go. I know from first-hand experience the enormously positive effect that this kind of dinner has on my health and well-being because I’ve eaten it on too many occasions to count.
Although cooking a dinner like this requires quite a bit of effort, from purchasing the ingredients, to washing them, cutting them up and steaming them (in the case of the vegetables), it’s possible to cook double quantities of the rice and of the vegetables and refrigerate them in preparation for the following nights’ dinner. (The best approach is to cook double quantities of rice on night and then double quantities of vegetables the next night, alternating between cooking rice and vegetables.) You’ll also have to cut up and prepare the garnishes to put on top of the dinner each night. Cooking double quantities necessitates the use of quite a large stainless steel steamer for the vegetables. Since you’re cooking double quantities each night and there are an odd number of days in the week, Saturday is the odd day out. On Saturday night, you can cook some rice, steam some beans and cut up a tomato, half a Spanish onion, a large mushroom, a third of an avocado and a stick of celery. Otherwise you can cook something easy and quick on this seventh night, like pasta, cut-up cheese and a cut-up tomato, together with all of the garnishes of Spanish onion, mushroom, avocado and celery previously listed.
All the times that you can eat, as outlined in the schedule above, of 6:05 am, 6:55 am, 10:00 am, 12:30 pm, 3:00 pm, 5:00 pm and 6:30 pm, ensure that your hair is constantly supplied with a source of food to fuel its growth. When you starve your body of food, it does have a negative effect on your hair, which generally withers under this deprivation of nutrients in your body. By eating regularly throughout the day in this manner, you can ensure that your hair is continually being supplied with all of the building blocks that it needs to thrive and grow. Note that it’s important to eat dinner at 6:30 pm, or 7:00 pm at the latest, so that your body has made sufficient progress towards digesting it by 9:00 pm when you’re due to go to sleep. Because eating such a nutritionally rich dinner will physiologically stimulate your body quite considerably, you’ll need at least 90 minutes after you’ve finished eating for your body to be suitably tired and ready to fall asleep at the end of all of the day’s activities.
Following a diet like this is obviously going to cause your body to produce a significant volume of physical waste matter as a result of the normal process of digestion. However, if your body is functioning normally, you should only have to use the bathroom once at the beginning of the day when you wake up in order to rid your body of the physical waste matter that this kind of diet generates. The overriding objective of a diet like this is to supply the body with more than what it needs for optimal health so that the body can service its needs for repairing and building itself and discard any surplus nutrients that it’s digested. Of course, the body does all of this autonomously and is therefore absolutely amazing. To try to supply the body with exactly or precisely what it needs and no more is folly. It's like trying to get somewhere exactly on time to the millisecond. It’s not actually possible. You're either early or you’re late. The cost saving or whatever saving from trying to supply the body with precisely what it needs is immaterial in dollar terms or any other terms. In any case, how can a person possibly know precisely what their body needs? Maybe a select few do, but most people, including me, don’t.
I provide my body with an excess supply of a wide range of nutrients on a daily basis and let it take what it needs. Providing the body with more than what it needs will lead very quickly to growth and strengthening. Conversely, providing the body with less than what it needs will lead very quickly to atrophy and weakening. People who have thick, lustrous heads of hair aren’t nutritionally deficient. They maintain their enviable manes with diets rich in a wide range of nutrients on a daily basis. It’s interesting that people, whose hair has thinned or fallen out altogether, often exhibit signs of malnutrition in other parts of their bodies, such as premature aging of the skin or lack of muscle tone. The correlation between the nutritional sufficiency of a person’s diet, the health of their body and the health of their hair is undeniable.
Copyright 2013 Andrew Mackinnon. All rights reserved.