Vitamins for Wellness

I also have noticed my hair thinning, and eat a primarily vegan diet. I read just yesterday in “First” magazine, that a deficiency in B vitamins can lead to hair thinning in some people. It might be worth looking into.

You can easily get enough protein from a vegan diet, but if you’re losing hair, it sounds like you’re not getting enough.
Vegetables aren’t a good source of protein except dark leafy greens. These contain complete protein equal to meat, they are the staple food of nature’s vegetarians – gorrilas eat leaves and have huge muscles, cows eat grass and grow huge bodies. However it is difficult for human vegans to eat enough greens for their protein needs because greens are a) expensive and b) a lot of people don’t like them. Wild greens – weeds – are free, and you can add some like chickweed to salads. Most are very tough, impossible to chew raw, and taste very bitter, but if you cook them they become soft and pleasant-tasting and you can use them like spinach. Find a book on wild foods so you know what to pick (some weeds are poisonous). Most people can recognise nettles and dandelion and dock leaves and they’re extremely good for you. Nettle is known from improving hair health and dandelion is a brilliant liver booster, both are also full of iron.
Seaweed is nutritionally very similar to greens, so also an excellent free protein source.

For cheap foods you can buy – you need to combine legumes (lentils/beans/chickpeas/peanuts) with wholegrains to make a complete protein. Or soya or quinoa are complete all by themselves. Hence most vegan processed foods are made from soya. Buy soya meat, or have meals containing both legumes and grains. For example:

Beans on toast
Hoummus (chickpeas and sesame) on Pitta Bread
Lentil Dhal with Rice
Lentil Bolognaise with Pasta
Peanut butter on Rice Cakes
Bean Chillie and Rice
Bean Hotpot with Bread
Bean Stew with Dumplings
Chickpea pie with wholewheat pastry.

It’s a myth that vegans replace meat with vegetables. They replace it with legumes+grains, and also nuts and seeds. Raw vegans replace it with greens, but that is really expensive.

been a veggie/vegan for more than 25yrs. was personally born with VERY thin hair, started the veggie thing at about 17yrs old. one of the 1st things i did was to research how to make my hair thicker & more healthy as i was on swim team & surfed every day. and the ocean washed up the best thing for hair…….
Seaweeds!!! i am not so sure why but the more i ate the less my hair required trimming due to split ends & my hair did get noticeably a bit thicker, could never get it to grow past my shoulders, now many yrs down the line , my hair is just above my behind & my heart meds make my hair fall out, AAAARGH! back to basics, MORE seaweed! and again it has really helped. oh & i never took birth control, too many animals suffered through testing. used Self-Control. maybe the combo of diet change & birth control has contributed to your current hair loss. well hope this helps. =>:)

I would see a doctor.

I know this is hard to take, but not everybody is meant to be a vegan/vegetarian. There are some people whose bodies can handle it and other people whose bodies can’t.

I was a vegetarian for several years until my body said “Nope, no more” and now I eat meat (not a lot and mostly fish), but I had gone to the doctor and tried everything they recommended. When that didn’t work, I just faced the fact that I had one of those bodies that couldn’t adapt to vegetarianism.