The Dietary Change That Turns Hair Cells & Skin Cells Into Each Other

…and other items from this week’s health news:

Hair today, skin tomorrow?

Hair follicle stem cells (HFSCs), best known for maintaining hair growth, have shown they can also skin repair when needed, by “switching teams” and becoming skin cells.

A key trigger for this shift is the availability of serine—a non-essential amino acid found in foods like meats, animal milks, and grains. When serine levels drop, either through diet or metabolic disruption, the stress response kicks in, prompting HFSCs to pause hair production and focus instead on healing damaged skin; this becomes even more pronounced when the skin is injured—which prompts HFSCs to strongly favor wound repair over hair regeneration, accelerating the healing process.

While reducing serine intake helps strongly push HFSCs toward repair mode, doing the opposite and increasing dietary serine only modestly boosts hair growth, suggesting that the body tightly controls circulating serine levels:

Read in full: Restricting 1 amino acid in food could speed wound healing

Related: The Diet That Slows Skin Aging

Healthy heart, healthy everything else

At 10almonds we often say “healthy heart; healthy brain“, because the former feeds the latter (with oxygen and nutrients) and plays its part in ultimately taking away detritus (thus avoiding build-ups of harmful proteins that are implicated in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, amongst other dementias).

However, the same is also true for the rest of the body, making heart health truly critical to every other kind of health—for example, a review of hundreds of studies found that people with heart-healthy lifestyles were more likely to preserve brain and lung function, vision, hearing, muscle strength, and dental health as they aged.

Beyond that, they also had lower risks of stress, chronic diseases (e.g. cancer, diabetes, COPD, dementia, fatty liver disease), and mental health conditions like depression:

Read in full: Heart-healthy habits benefit entire body from head to toe, study finds

Related: Your Health Audit, From Head To Toe

Good news for late-night snack-artists

“Don’t eat late at night!”, the common advice goes.

Researchers (Dr. Chelsea Price et al.), investigated this and found that eating a whole avocado (minus the skin and stone) at night led to slightly lower triglyceride levels before breakfast and significantly lower levels three hours after breakfast, compared to a low-fat snack or a processed snack with similar fat and fiber.

This is important, because high triglyceride levels are linked to insulin resistance and increased heart disease risk in people with prediabetes; thus, lowering them generally supports metabolic and cardiovascular health, and in this case, helps mitigate diabetic or prediabetic symptoms.

However, it’s worth noting that:

1. It was a small (n=27) study
2. It was funded by the Avocado Nutrition Center

Now, we don’t know to what extent “Big Avocado” is (or isn’t) contributing to publication bias here, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Read in full: Nighttime avocado snack may support heart health in prediabetic adults

Related: The Prediabetes Diet Plan: How to Reverse Prediabetes and Prevent Diabetes Through Healthy Eating and Exercise – by Hillary Wright, M.Ed., RDN

Take care!