I recently read about a special comb that stops hair loss by shooting laser beams into the scalp and stimulating the follicles.  Sounds like a hunk of hooey.  I'd have to see some serious independent studies before I even consider believing that might work. On the other hand, I'd like to share what I learned recently when charged with doing some research on the matter.

There was a recent New York Times article that discussed nutrition at length.  At great length.  It was really long. But the gist of it was that modern nutrition science sucks. Scientists see something happen, they isolate a chemical that seems to be at the center of the activity, put it in a pill and call it a vitamin.  A recent study  showed that many (not all) vitamins had absolutely no effect on lifespan when comparing one group of regular vitamin takers with a group of people who eschewed them.

Bottom line: we just don't understand the complex reactions that occur in food well enough to pull a chemical out and confidently pronounce to the world that this is the supplement you want to to take for whatever reason. We do it anyway, but the public would be smart to be skeptical.

I've always been in the camp that said if if you eat a balanced diet then you're getting all the vitamins/nutrients you need. Now I also know that if you stuff a bunch of vitamins in your mouth you might not be getting the vitamins/nutrients you need (at least not from the pills) because the molecules in the vitamin just don't work the same way they did when they were inside the food they came out of because they worked together with all the molecules around them. This isn't to say all vitamins are worthless, but some of them certainly are.

And what does any of this vitamin/nutrition stuff have to do with baldness and prostate cancer? Well, nothing. Although it may have something to do with stopping both of them. But we'll get to that.

Anyone who has done a little research on hair loss probably knows that most hair loss is caused by a chemical called dihydrotestosterone (DHT).  I read about that years ago but for some reason the authors all left out the interesting fact of where DHT comes from. There is a non-coincidental link between balding men and prostate problems.  Both are triggered by DHT, which is created by an unhealthy prostate.

I encourage all of you to look this up for yourselves because not only will it give you more confidence in the truth of it and greater incentive to act but you also might come across even more new information to share.

Anyway, when a prostate begins to create DHT, some of it goes into the blood stream and as one of the side effects it swells the skin around certain hair follicles towards the center of the scalp, crushing them slowly so that each successive hair is thinner and wispier until the follicle is no longer able to generate a hair and eventually dies a permanent death.

Rogaine attacks this process, but it does nothing about the DHT.  Rogaine is like Viagra — originally a vassodialator, blood pressure medication (don't even think about drinking it, the concentrations are way too high in the topical ointment for oral application and it's cut with some nasty stuff).  By dilating the pores where the folicles are located, Minoxidil (the active ingredient in Rogaine) temporarily undoes some of the work the DHT has done, but does nothing about the DHT itself.

Propecia actually blocks the production of DHT, but it does so inefficiently and with side effects.  It is also possible there may be long-term side effects which are not yet fully understood.  On the other hand it has been proven that certain foods can also promote prostate health and even stem the production of DHT to an extent. We'll get to that in a moment.

Usually around the age of 40 many men develop a need to pee in the middle of the night, a feeling that their bladder is full when it is not, reduction in urine pressure, and other problems related to an enlarging prostate. DHT, once created by the prostate, triggers prostate growth.  In an unhealthy prostate this can result in a chain reaction of the prostate growing larger very rapidly, picking up speed over the course of several months or years until it is too big of a problem to ignore.

Well, this unrestricted growth is believed to trigger another: prostate cancer — which is why waiting until the problem is too big to ignore is always a really, really bad idea and why prostate exams are important for men over a certain age even if no symptoms present themselves. However Soy products as well as other plants (Saw Palmetto, for instance) have been shown to slow the production of DHT.  So every time you eat tofu, edamame or even soy sauce you are not only promoting a healthy prostate, but also preventing hair loss. 

I'm not usually one for dietary supplements, but I read enough about Saw Palmetto extract to say it's worth investigating for yourself or discussing with your doctor (you're always supposed to do that when considering new dietary supplements, dontchya know?)  From my research, it seems to do a good job fighting the production of DHT and has no side effects.  And the pills that are available aren't "vitamins" that have been discovered, they're basically nothing more than the juices of the plant put into a gelcap. But maybe that's exactly what the human body needs.

The basic trend here seems to go back to what I was saying at the beginning: We're pretty terrible at isolating specific chemicals/vitamins/nutrients/whatever from foods.  We put them in pills and many of them just don't work the same.  Nature has done a pretty good job putting all of the pieces of the puzzle onto the earth and while some people may just be genetically doomed to hair loss and/or prostate problems, they can probably lessen those problems through diet.  In the meantime everyone else may be able to avoid those problems unnecessarily by being educated about diet. 

As a footnote: Tomato products also promote a healthy prostate.  Although they are not hair related, they're worth mentioning because the anti-oxidants promote healthy upkeep on organs throughout the body.  My suggestion is if you're not already taking a prescription from a doctor, but you're looking for one because of your hair or prostate, just be sure to eat soy products often and take another supplement like Saw Palmetto. — And eating tomatoes won't stop hair loss but it will help in lots of other ways so eat tomatoes and drink red wine (1 glass per evening — that's a 4 oz serving, don't get any ideas with that beer stein) .

 - one

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I have a bone to pick with Dark Matter.  If I've lost you already, feel free to read up on Dark Matter before continuing.

(Checks watch) All right, here we go. Dark Matter makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways.  Just from a very basic standpoint, when you start off a universe with a boatload of energy which eventually condenses into matter, you would expect the simplest forms of matter to be the most abundant.  And, of course Hydrogen is the simplest atom and simultaneously the most abundant element in the universe, but is an atom really the simplest form of matter?

Well we know that protons, neutrons and electrons break down into smaller pieces we know as quarks.  Bosons, leptons, etc, are simpler and as far as we know they are matter.  How about neutrinos?  The standard model, with 4% regular matter, 22% dark matter and 74% dark energy fits a lot of holes in the known universe.  The problem I have is this: It doesn't fit our solar system.

If galaxies formed inside giant clouds of dark matter, clouds which are held together by their own massive gravity, and this is used to explain the galactic rotational curve — where stars in the spiral arms (like our sun) of galaxies orbit at the same velocity as stars closer to the galactic core (and super-massive black holes) — then that would seem to imply dark matter is as abundant in our solar system as it is elsewhere.

But then, wouldn't our own measurements of mass already include dark matter?  Everything we ever weighed would have been in the presence of dark matter.  The planets of our solar system would be flying through it all the time.  Which begs the question: why is the rotational curve of our solar system mathematically sound without the need to bring "dark matter" into the equation?

It seems to this amateur physicist that when Newton's laws failed to explain the distribution of gravity on a galactic scale that scientists introduced a constant (in the form of dark matter) to "fix" the equation so it worked, but the constant somehow is ignored at smaller scales.  And it's not like we're talking about a little constant — without "dark matter" we only have 4% of the gravity needed to hold together a galaxy.

From what I have read, proposals that Newton's laws need to be adjusted for the very large, just as they had to be adjusted for the very small, are not mathematically sound and simply do not work.  This may be the case, but I still can't help but wonder why physicists don't have a problem introducing "dark matter" to resolve the issue when there seems to be such an obvious discrepency: Our sun is orbiting the galactic center at the same velocity as stars closer to the core hypothetically due to the presence of dark matter, the very presence of which should affect our solar system in ways we can clearly see it is not being affected.

I give up. My brain hurts.

- one 

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