hey everyone this is erica johnston and welcome back to my channel
so if you're new to my channel i just want to tell you right now that
yes my hair is natural and i started going grey when i was
16 years old so in case you're wondering how old i am now
i'm 41. so in today's video we're going to talk about eight different causes of
gray hair and things you might be able to do to
prevent your hair from graying even faster so keep watching
so i did do a video recently about reversing gray hair and i'll be sure to
link that one above scientists have been working hard to
discover different ways to either slow down the rate of graying or to
prevent it all together and even reverse it so first and
foremost the number one cause of gray hair is your
genetics and i'm sure you've heard this before
if your mom and dad went gray at a very young age then you most likely will as
well
the second factor for graying a little bit younger
is your ethnicity so for caucasians you'd be considered a premature
gray-haired person if you were around the age of 20
and then 25 if you're asian and then 30 if you're african-american
so your ethnicity might play a role in it and it might not
the latest finding and this was in a 2009
study that was published by the federation of american societies for
experimental biology try saying that 10 times fast they found
that dna damage in the hair follicles was caused by a buildup of hydrogen
peroxide you know that same product that people use to kind of make
themselves go blonde they found that a build-up of that in
the hair follicle is one of the main reasons for going
gray alright so it's interesting because hair
gets its color from a pigment called melanin which is
produced by melanocyte cells that are in the hair
follicles so what happens is if you get this
buildup of hydrogen peroxide in the follicle then it sort of disrupts
that melanin production and then your hair ends up
turning gray so that is a big factor
that they're finding for the cause one of the major causes
of gray hair this information is coming straight from
webmd so i just want you to know where i'm getting my information from
okay so another cause of gray hair and this isn't maybe necessarily a direct
cause there's kind of some controversy over this is
stress so you know you hear a lot of people say
like oh you know if you have a you know four or eight
year term as a president you are bound to go and gray and you
know it when you look it seems as though like a
lot of presidents have gone gray very quickly but really
what's happening is stress can cause hair thinning or
shedding and then when that shedding happens
then the hair might be replaced with gray hair
so that is sort of like the correlation of it right i find that very interesting
so for example too if somebody's going through chemotherapy
and they're losing a lot of the hair then their hair may
grow back white so is stress the cause of it it's kind of
like a non-direct correlation i suppose so
stress is is one thing all right so i just want to say
that these causes are not absolute so you know if you
do one of these things or you have one of these things
then it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to go gray quicker
but these are just some of the causes and it might be like a combination of
them as well all right so next is smoking and this is
just one of those lifestyle choices that you know it may cause
your hair to go gray quicker and it also can cause your hair to turn yellow right
from the smoke so i mean it's just one of those things
that you have to make a decision and and if you want to smoke then smoke i'm
not going to be here to tell you not to smoke
all right next up is low vitamin b12 so i'm gonna have to read this for sure
but i just want to tell you about vitamin b12 and it's actually really
important it helps make your dna and your red blood cells
and your body doesn't naturally make vitamin b12 so you actually have to get
it from animal based foods and from supplements so very
interesting right especially if you don't eat
animal foods you're more likely to develop a vitamin b12
deficiency if you've got an immune system disorder so some symptoms of
vitamin b12 deficiency are weakness
tiredness or lightheadedness having heart palpitations or shortness of
breath pale skin a smooth tongue interesting
constipation diarrhea loss of appetite or gas
nerve problems like numbness or tingling muscle weakness and problems walking
vision loss and then mental problems like depression memory loss or behavior
changes so anyways if you if you decide that you need a
b12 supplement you should probably let your doctor know so that he or she can
make sure that you're getting enough of the supplement and not taking too
much so another cause of gray hair is having issues with your thyroid or
specifically thyroid disease so as we get older we just need to make sure our
thyroid is functioning well and you know that
everything's okay so a final potential cause of gray hair
is if you develop or have vitiligo so vitiligo is essentially when your
skin loses pigment just like we talked about
melanin in our hair follicles we also have melanin in
our skin right which produces color so potentially if the skin
on your head has vitiligo then you could end up having
your hair in those sections grow white so very very interesting i really
enjoyed looking this up i'm always curious as
you know i am like the gray hair guru everything gray hair
if you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like share it with your
friends and subscribe if you haven't already
done so until next week bye for now and it's produced by milan
and which is pr which is produced by milan milan and anna like i can't even
talk my dog is like really really getting
cozy okay you settled you good lenny
okay great vit-tiligo vitiligo vitiligo oh my gosh i don't
know how to pronounce it vitiligo i probably should look it up
you