Here’s some hair-raising news for dieters.
A hyped eating plan touted for helping with weight loss, blood sugar, and inflammation can have a mostly unpleasant side effect—your luscious hair can lose its volume.
A new study found that mice subjected to intermittent fasting – which involves restricting eating to a specific daily window – had better metabolic health but slower hair growth than mice with round-the-clock access to food .
And when they studied the same thing in humans, they found similar results.
“We don’t want to scare people away from intermittent fasting because it’s associated with many beneficial effects — it’s just important to be aware that it can have some unwanted effects,” said the study’s senior author. and stem cell biologist Bing Zhang. of Westlake University in China.
How fasting can affect hair
Research shows that intermittent fasting can improve the function of stem cells in the blood, intestines and muscle tissue – and their ability to regenerate. Zhang’s team wanted to see the effect of fasting on skin and hair cells.
The researchers forced the rats to follow a daily meal schedule that allowed only eight hours of access to food, with 16 hours of fasting or an alternate daily feeding schedule.
Mice on both intermittent fasting programs had only partial hair growth after 96 days, while mice with unlimited access to food had regrown most of their hair after 30 days—a finding that surprised the researchers.
The team determined that fasting selectively eliminates activated hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs). Hair growth depends on the activity of these cells.
The science behind intermittent fasting
Intermittent fasting forces the body to use stored fat as its primary source of energy instead of sugar available from food.
Body fat releases free fatty acids that enter recently activated HFSCs, causing cell damage and even death.
Applying vitamin E, an antioxidant found in hair growth products, twice daily to the back skin of mice helped HFSCs survive the fast.
Skin stem cells were not affected by intermittent fasting, with the researchers assessing their ability to neutralize harmful free radicals.
The researchers tried to confirm their findings with a small clinical trial involving 49 healthy young adults – they noticed that fasting had a milder effect on hair growth in humans.
Those who fasted 18 hours a day for 10 days – an extreme version of the diet – had an average hair growth rate that was 18% slower compared to those who did not fast. Larger and longer studies would be needed to verify this result.
“The human population is very heterogeneous, so the effects may be different for different people,” Zhang said. “Mice also have a very high metabolic rate compared to humans, so fasting and metabolic switching have a more severe effect on mouse HFSCs.”
What’s next
The results were published Friday in the journal Cell Press Cell.
The researchers plan to collaborate with local hospitals to explore how fasting affects wound healing and the regeneration of other cells, while identifying substances that may help promote hair growth during fasting.
Long before this research, medical experts warned that intermittent fasting is not for everyone. A large study this year found that those who limited their eating to less than eight hours a day were more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than people who ate in a 12- to 16-hour window.
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