Hair, Omega 3, DHA, meat...
This might sound cranky at first, but I wonder.
In water fasting, we like to never add anything to the body when fasting, eg drink distilled water, take no additives or food supplements, don't put lotions on skin. But shouldn't we equally not take anything away? And what do we take away?
Answer = the oil in our hair, each time we shampoo it, and the oil on our body when we wash it. I wonder what that lovely clean skin feeling would be like if we didn't wash?
I have been looking into people who do not wash their body or hair. The results are quite surprising. After a while, they develop a natural equilibrium, and their body or hair does not smell, and hair can look great, but first it has to go through a greasy stage because it is so used to trying to replace the natural oils that we wash away regularly with petrochemical products, and it takes time for the production process to get back to normal.
Here are some more results, in addition to the thread with the Daily Mail article I posted recently. I'll put a quote or two below each link:
The Long Hair Care Forum - "Woman goes 11 years without washing hair"
EVERYONE has heard the rumour - don't wash your hair and it will start to clean itself after a few days.
For the past couple of weeks one of TV's best-known faces, Andrew Marr, has put the theory to the test and now he says his hair is fluffy and odour-free.
He reckons that this is because he is not drowning his locks in chemicals which, in turn, means he isn't stripping away the natural oils and therefore his scalp isn't having to compensate by producing excess grease.
Alison Palmer
I was intrigued when I saw a TV show about people whose hair "self-cleaned" because they didn't wash it. I was an 18-year-old student at the time and it seemed a good time to try. With very long hair which took an age to dry, it would be one less thing to worry about.
After a week it became really greasy. I kept it in a French plait, persevered, and after six weeks it was back to normal. No one even noticed.
Now I describe it with the expression "water off a duck's back". Because each strand ia coated in oil - not the sort which builds up because of chemicals, but natural oils - dirt or grime can be brushed off daily with a natural bristle brush. I trim my hair myself and don't even wet it unless I want to style it. When I go swimming, I let it dry then brush the chlorine out. I did have a bit of colour put in in February this year but I didn't have to go through the six weeks' greasy period again because my hair was so protected with oil.
Penny Weynberg
Nature Moms "The No Shampoo Alternative - no Poo"
You’re thinking you could never do without shampoo, that your hair would be a big oily mess — but it’s quite the opposite. It's a supply and demand relationship, much like nursing a baby. The more your baby wants to nurse, the more milk your body produces. If you suddenly stopped nursing your baby there would be a lot of excess milk, engorgement, etc., for a while until your body returned to a state of balance.
The oily secretions of our body are very much the same. The more we strip away the natural oils, the more demand we are creating and the more oils our bodies will make. So if you stop using the surfactants cold turkey, your body will still be overproducing oil and there will be a lot of oil until your body reaches a balance again
Christi Colvin
It's worth looking at the above links to see all the comments, I have only put a few brief points here.
Then I googled hair and omega 3, and hair and dha which are the things our bodies seem to be lacking in today's diet, see this post that got an RRR. As you can see from the first two links, omega 3 appears to be required for good hair, and I believe DHA as well. The third link shows that a lack of DHA seems to result in Parkinsons disease and Alzheimer's disease. This forces the vegan or vegetarian to take supplements with their diet to stay healthy, or eat occasional meat or oily fish.
So I am now wondering that if our bodies were no burdened with the task of replenishing our scalp and body oils so frequently because we wash them away with chemicals, perhaps not doing this would help our DHA levels get back to normal? I wonder if people who wash their hair less frequently have higher DHA levels? Is what we are taking away from our bodies the problem, rather than some deficiency in our eating?
By the way, you will find people out there who say this is completely the wrong thing to do, and if we don't wash our hair we will get terrible scalp diseases and all sorts of bad things. However they are mostly trichologists and salon owners. I guess it is in their financial interests to say that, just as doctors say we need medicine.
I may give this a try, and get my DHA levels tested sometime.