Marcella La Cioppa According to recent research, intermittent fasting, despite having positive effects on health and weight loss, could have an important side effect involving hair.
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Intermittent fasting has reached widespread popularity, with numerous studies touting its benefits, from weight loss to improved blood sugar control to increased longevity. However, one recent study says that it may come with an unexpected downside: slowing hair growth.
The study
This study presented that while the fasting regime resulted in considerable metabolic health benefits, it may also cause a delay in hair regeneration.
“We don’t want to scare people away from practicing intermittent fasting because it’s associated with many health benefits. It’s just important to be aware that it might have some unintended effects,” said the researchers.
The team tested two fasting protocols:
- Time-restricted feeding, in which participants ate during an 8-hour window and fasted for 16 hours.
- Alternate-day fasting, in which participants fasted every other day but ate freely on non-fasting days.
The results were not as hypothesized. Scientists initially thought that fasting would speed up hair growth. Contrarily, it did not.
Hair follicle stem cells
The researchers attribute this effect to the response of hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs), which are critical for hair regeneration but struggled to fight off oxidative stress, a type of damage caused by unstable molecules called free radicals, during periods of fasting.
This stress was due to the metabolic switch of the body from glucose to fat burning during fasting. This switch brought an overload of free fatty acids into HFSCs, which initiated programmed cell death or apoptosis.
Future directions
The researchers now plan to take this further by studying how fasting affects wound healing and other varieties of stem cells in the body.
Equally, they were interested in showing exactly how fasting influences wound healing in skin would proceed with finding metabolites possibly helping HFSCs survive the fasting state, thus supporting hair growth during periods of fasting.
Takeaway: balance is key
For now, the takeaway isn’t to give up intermittent fasting. Rather, this study puts into perspective that even the healthiest of habits can have their side effects. Slower hair growth might be a mild trade-off for improved metabolic health, but knowing the risks could dictate how people will fast in the future.
Source: Oxford Academy
