Sunday 5 April 2015

Four Vitamin B12 Tablets A Day Keep The Grey Away!

Not that red hair goes grey as such. It fades and fades to strawberry blonde, ash blonde and then white.

Mine was beginning to fade at a rate of knots. Then I read that Vitamin B12 was good for hair. I took a couple of tablets a day for six months and noticed my hair was getting darker. I upped it to four a day (like Vitamin C, you cannot overdose on Vitamin B12 as the body exudes what it doesn't need). Now a year later my hair is back to the shade it was when I was a teenager. With the help of Silica and Biotin vitamins, it is growing stronger and thicker again too.

I am not on any sort of retainer from a vitamin supplier for sharing this with you. I merely share it because I am a nice person who likes to share what I find helpful. Similarly I find that Kelp tablets are good for regulating hormones (we have a dire shortage of Iodine in the modern western diet), Iron tablets give me nice rosy lips and enhanced circulation, Vitamin C shortens colds and hastens healing.

Vitamin B complex helps prevent ladies' troubles, Zinc, men's. Biotin can help non-insulin dependent diabetics from deteriorating to injectable diabetes. Vitamin D is good for depression. And bone strength.

All this is from friends' anecdotal evidence as well as personal experience, so of course it counts for nothing in provable terms.

Then again there will never be any in-depth medical research carried out on vitamins as it is impossible to patent them so drug companies are never going to spend millions on food supplements that they cannot own and profit from. Though they obviously perceived vitamins as enough of a potential threat to drug sales to try and get the EU to ban them for public sale more than once and I have signed a slew of petitions against this outrageous infringement of consumer freedom over the years.

Rather it is up to each of us to be our own guinea pigs to see what helps our own body to function at optimum level and what doesn't. And really, unless you are determined to overdose on a substance to a ridiculous degree, you can easily decrease a vitamin dosage if you notice any adverse effects. Indeed there is less risk of side-effects than there is with pharmaceutical drugs, not all of which obey the doctors' Hippocratic oath of 'First, do no harm.' Which isn't to say pharmaceutical drugs do not have their place in treatment and healing, obviously.

I once watched a ridiculous TV debate about the Bristol Cancer Centre where one cancer sufferer had overdosed on carrots to the point that she had assumed an orange hue and was blaming the clinic for her own stupidity (or desperation). However much to my surprise no one challenged her as to whether this was her own personal choice or she was actually following the Clinic's guidelines on how many carrots she should eat (clearly not, judging by the way the show seemed weighted against giving the same debate time to those advocating the use of alternatives, no matter that those trying the alternatives had often exhausted conventional options and were at the end of the line, so any improvement would be tantamount to a miracle).

So there is no regulating for common sense whatever people imbibe, which is the only sure means of guaranteeing safety.

However with natural vitamin content in our food having declined by 45% since WWII owing to intensive and unnatural farming methods, supplements have become an essential item for many of us, no matter how healthily we try to eat. Simultaneously as we age our bodies synthesise what vitamins we consume less effectively meaning we can become even more deficient. For example many men no longer absorb enough zinc to keep their prostate healthy so may need to take a supplement to help. In old age the individual's diet may also narrow in variety which means there are increasing numbers of false/positive tests for dementia when actually the individual is vitamin-deprived.

Personally I am mystified as to why so much attention is devoted to calorific and fat intake when vitamins and minerals are at least as important, yet their levels are seldom listed on foodstuff labels. Indeed if one eats food of low vitamin/mineral content, that is the very time the body creates an artificial hunger to induce one to eat more to compensate. I therefore maintain that if all food were of high vitamin/mineral content and food value, we would automatically eat less of it, so there would be no need for diet foods (not all of which are of high nutritional value, even if they are low-fat).

On a final note, if you want to try the Vitamin B12 as an experiment for yourself, do let me know how you get on. I'd be fascinated to know it if works for you as well. Let's conduct a mass experiment (for humans on humans) here.

4 comments:

Steve said...

When we were kids my mother went through a spate of throwing vitamin supplements down our throats... probably at the behest of our GP. At the time food labelling was dire and nobody knew what was in their food at all. As an adult I've never thought about pepping myself up with vitamins... at my age I probably should consider it!

Wisewebwoman said...

I take substantial amts of Vit D in drop form and also a mix of Vit C and Lysine.
Interesting about B12 and a restoration of hair colour.
Mine has never gone completely gray but hey, worth a try to restore it.
XO
WWW

Patent Attorney said...

That's really interesting to know! Question now is whether I want to actually keep the silver fox look?

The Poet Laura-eate said...

Steve, you are right about the 70s. But despite better labelling food production standards are still selling us short of vitamins.

WWW, I remember being wowed by your results with Vitamin D helping depression. Keep taking the tablets as they say!

Patent Attorney - whatever works for you! Thanks for dropping by.