Hair Loss and Orthorexic Diets

My hair seems to grow back. I noticed that it’s thicker now. Small hair follicles start popping up in bald patches. But, I’m not doing anything Peaty nowadays except avoiding PUFA. I don’t take supplements either, except for ionized magnesium, 100 or 200 mg of niacin and, sometimes, a tablespoon of hemp oil before bedtime.

Ray Peat Forum Member Strongbad, April 25, 2016

Although a continuous process, and like aging of the skin, baldness can be interrupted or reversed in some cases.

Dave Foster, April 25, 2016

Well, I lost over 90% of my hair after Peating for a year; I was so close of being completely bald by end of January. The fact that it’s growing back after abandoning Peat’s ideas is pretty telling about how damaging the diet was.

RAY PEAT FORUM MEMBER STRONGBAD, APRIL 25, 2016

How did you regrow your hair?

DAVE FOSTER, APRIL 25, 2016

Completely abandon sugar, sugary foods, milk and dairy. Avoid grains, except white or brown rice and quinona, and don’t consume gluten. Eat 32% meat + 36% cooked green vegetables + 32% brown (or white) rice. The “meat” should include 50% chicken/turkey and 50% beef. For “cooked green vegetables,” include spinach; collard greens; kale; small amounts of broccoli, as too much causes constipation; cilantro; cabbage and so on.
Brown or white rice may be bought from Asian stores imported from Thailand, Vietnam or India to minimize the arsenic content. Also, clean the rice Asian-style before cooking it to wash away any excess arsenic.

Eat lots of well-cooked mung beans daily. Lots of B-vitamins there. That way, there’s no more need for a vitamin B-complex supplement and any toxicity therein. When consumed via food, B-vitamins never have any toxicity or risk of overdose, which includes vitamin B6. I take almost no supplements.

RAY PEAT FORUM MEMBER STRONGBAD, APRIL 29, 2016

What do you make of Peat’s pro-sugar stance as far as any benefits to CO2 production? When compared to starch, fructose triggers a smaller release of insulin from the pancreas, so do you view the latter as favorable?

DAVE FOSTER, APRIL 29, 2016

Sugar has benefits but like everything else, it should be consumed moderately. Our body strives for balance. Anything extreme like all-meat, low-carb, all-fruit, the paleo diet, veganism or whatever else, including Peat’s high-sugar diet, all damage our bodies. When things are in balance, that’s when our bodies are the healthiest.

We even need sufficient amount of estrogen, serotonin, cortisol and so on. Health problems occur when they’re out of their respective ranges. Ray Peat wants to lower serotonin, but a high-sugar diet increases serotonin. So, he lowers it by taking various supplements. This is extreme and not what balance is all about. Besides, consuming fructose has caused me to gain 32 lbs during my Peating months. What looks good in research papers doesn’t always translate into applications in the real world. It’s all about context, and Ray’s community lacks it. All these research papers posted on the Ray Peat Forum or anywhere else all lack context.

If you’re low in serotonin, lowering it more devastates you. If deficient in iron, you need to increase your intake and not lower it like Ray Peat recommends.
It’s about balance and moderation. Problems happen when intakes are either excessive or inadequate. When I eat balanced meals, such as meat with green vegetables and brown or white rice, my body returns to a state of health.
I’m now back to 163 lbs, whereas I used to be 192 lbs while Peating. I now no longer have symptoms of adrenal fatigue, cravings for sugary food every three hours, or symptoms of insulin resistance or pre-diabetes. My body temperature hovers around 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit. I have no more candida overgrowth, and I’m not tired at all. I also don’t suffer from jitters or midnight arousal from low blood sugar and so on.
Ray Peat is not a god. He’s a man like everyone else. I’m pretty sure he makes mistakes or errors every now and then.
To be honest, his body chemistry is rather rare; he’s considered a High 4 body chemistry. What he recommends is not suitable for majority of people. It’s even more pronounced when a person is of a different race, where their biological chemistry is different. The fact that i’m growing more hair follicles in previously bald spots means that I’m on the right track. Only when i followed all these fad diets that my health tanked, Peat diet included. I’m just saying that all these theories in this forum are useless the moment they’re put to use in the real world.
There’s an endless debate between sugar vs. starch, coffee vs. non-coffee, high-fat vs low-fat and so on.
At the end of the day, it’s all about eating foods to which our body responds the best. For mine, it’s an equal amount of everything, all except for sugar, dairy and gluten.
By the way, have you noticed that everyone here who tried the Peat-approach with supplements rarely improved? If they do, it’s only in the initial phase, and they later plummet down to the ground.
I haven’t seen anyone here who completely cured themselves of hypothyroidism, especially hair loss, even despite a referral from Danny Roddy. The trend that I see here is that a person’s health worsens for the most part. Some of them are even veterans, having been on the forum for years.
Most of them gain fat, become bloated and develop SIBO or digestive issues. Some start to get candida overgrowth symptoms, stomach problems, adrenals and jittery, as in heart palpation, issues. They wake up in the middle of the night, and so on. If that’s what getting “healthy” is like, then I’d rather be out.

RAY PEAT FORUM MEMBER STRONGBAD, APRIL 29, 2016

When I was taking all of my supplements, I felt great; what I would think would be optimal. I did drink a bit too much coffee.
I do think Peat has some great advice, but context is important.
Could you expound more upon your opinion of low ferritin?

Dave Foster, APRIL 30, 2016

Metabolism is both thyroid plus adrenals. Ray Peat is wrong that it’s all about the thyroid. Some people function better with high adrenal and low thyroid activity, whereas others function better as a high thyroid and low adrenal type. When people are high-adrenal-low-thyroid, they thrive more with estrogenic foods. This is why Asians can eat lots of soy-based food, which contains estrogen, without complications. Also notice that Asians age slower and live longer? That’s what being estrogenic does to a person, although they’re don’t have excessively high or low estrogen.

To up your iron, I won’t recommend supplementation due to possible toxicity. Just eat tons of beef. Plus you’ll get lots of zinc, glycine, glutamine, lycine and other amino acids that can only be found in red meat.
I get lots of vitamins A, E, and K2 [I think he meant K1], from green veggies nowadays. Since I avoided milk and dairy, I no longer need vitamin D supplementation. Vitamin D depletes when you consume excessive amounts of calcium-rich food like milk. Vitamin D works funny a lot of times. If I were you, I’d up magnesium instead, from green veggies, ionized magnesium, or Epsom salt baths. Magnesium helps boost Vitamin D internally.
Another thing that Ray Peat somehow overlook is the importance of glutathione. If you Google it, it’s the ultimate antioxidant in our body. It chelates toxins and some heavy metals out of our systems, it reduces oxidation and damages from free fatty acids etc. It’s what’s keeping us young, as in looking youthful and healthy. Also, when a person is sufficient in glutathione, there’ll be no candida overgrowth.
Yet high sugar consumption and avoidance of green vegetables and chicken meat causes glutathione depletion. Chicken and green vegetables have cysteine, glutamic acid and glycine, and some of them are available in beef. These amino acids are precursors to glutathione creation.
No wonder Asians age so slow. Chickens and vegetables are a huge part of their traditional meals.

RAY PEAT FORUM MEMBER STRONGBAD, APRIL 30, 2016

Personally, I have overactive sympathetic activity, so I have to take measures to counteract this. What do you think of the amino acid tryptophan in food?
Georgi Dinkov told me that selenium may support the protective effects of glutathione, and that’s a major reason to supplement it. Likewise, Peat recommends seafood consumption, which provides quite a bit of selenium.
So you support Buteyko breathing? It helps greatly with anxiety, as well as with visual and mental clarity.
Could you divulge more of your opinion on supplements and caffeine?

Dave Foster, May 1, 2016

Selenium is only a part of many glutathione precursors. I read your link about selenium but since I don’t have access to full-text, but only to the abstract, it’s difficult to see the context of the research. How many participants do they test? Are they equally varied age-wise, gender-wise, race-wise, genetic-wise, diet-wise and so on?
Taking selenium supplements as an addition to diet that’s already rich in glutathione precursors will likely produce more glutathione than if you supplement selenium with junk food that are not precursors to glutathione production.
We should take every research study with grain of salt: pro and against Peatism. Most of them lack context.
Also, as you notice in the Ray Peat Forum, genetics play a major part in how well or badly they take on certain foods. Some people do better with vegetables while others don’t. Some people do better with starch than sugar, or with caffeine than an absence of caffeine, and so on.
Tryptophan itself is not bad at all, it’s the predominant conversion from tryptophan to serotonin that is bad and subsequent possible serotonin excess. You need tryptophan to convert to niacin vitamin B3, then to NADH, which is the ATP generator for our own cellular metabolism. Yes, the cellular metabolism that Peat is all for. But, for tryptophan to convert to niacin, you need vitamins B2 and B6.
When you have sufficient niacin (vitamin B3) in your body, free radicals can be minimized, which is what Peat is for, too. Diabetes can be avoided due to lesser free radicals. Tumor and cancer sufferers are often deficient in niacin.
But as you are aware, B vitamins are very dangerous to supplement in excess due to risk of toxicity, especially B6 that can damage your nerves. However, there’s no such thing as vitamin B toxicity from food, not even B6. Besides beef liver, green vegetables and brown rice contain a lot of B-vitamins. That’s why I eat tons of greens and brown rice. Mung beans are also rich in B-vitamins.
Really, most but not all of our metabolic issues can be solved by eating food that are rich in B-vitamins and magnesium: not sugar and milk.
Sorry, I haven’t done any Buteyko breathing, so I can’t really comment on it. I can only comment on things that I’ve done extensively, such as 1-year of Peating. But I’ll take a look at it. Thanks.
I only drink caffeine in moderation. Just because Peat supports caffeine doesn’t mean I should drink 6 cups of coffee everyday. Just like because he likes carbs and sugar doesn’t mean I go out of my way to eat all sugar, all carbs and no fat. I’ve actually done that for 2.5 months as a PUFA depletion diet, and it didn’t work out for me. It actually cemented the candida overgrowth in my gut.
Again, it’s about balance and moderation. Also, it’s all about what my body tells me, not Peat. If I start getting jitters and heart palpation etc., I’m going to reduce the dosage next time. Heck, I’ll even take a few days off from coffee. I trust my body more than whatever gurus are out there.
Supplements should be taken just like taking medicines for cold and flu.
If I get the flu, will I take flu medicine? Yes. But if I’m healthy, do I keep taking flu medicine? No. That’d be weird and unnecessary.
I took tons of supplements to kick candida off my gut for almost two months. But now, I’m down to occasional niacin, magnesium and others whenever I feel like it these days. Not much at all.
If a person takes a lot of supplements, that means the diet is not nutrient-dense and balanced to begin with. Supplements is to a “supplement” diet, after all.
There’s also risks of over-supplementation with weird symptoms. Either fillers toxicity, out-of-balance nutrients, and so on. You get to see all these supplementation “weird symptoms.” So many to choose from.

RAY PEAT FORUM MEMBER STRONGBAD, May 3, 2016