Why does hair turn gray? | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Q: There they were. While blow drying my hair this weekend, I saw two renegade gray hairs right square on top of my head. I’d like to think they’re a result of the increasing stress I’m under at work, and am scared to admit that it might actually be a sign of aging. Is it possible for stress to actually make my hair go gray?

A: First of all, how is the word gray spelled anyway? It is grey? Or is it gray? Don’t you often wonder that yourself? Well, I did. That is, until my hubby challenged my double word scoring of “grey” in Scrabble. Then, I looked it up in good ol’ Webster’s and found out that either spelling of the word is correct. Upon further research, I also learned that generally, “grey” is used more often in England, and “gray” is more commonly used in America. Sort of like color and colour or center and centre.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can focus on the real question at hand — what is it that makes hair go gray in the first place and could it possibly be caused by stress?

For a long time, scientists believed that melanin was the culprit behind graying hair. Each hair follicle has its own supply of individualized melanin, made up of two shades — eumelanin (dark brown or black) and pheomelanin (yellow or red) that combine in different proportions to create your specific hair color. As we age, something causes us to stop producing this melanin and the result is gray, and then eventually white hair. [...]

Full article at mnn.com

There are religious traditions in which grey hair is considered a sign of ill health, and it looks like they may be right. Optimum blood pH levels for catalase are between 6.8 and 7.5, and the optimum pH level for human blood is in a very narrow range around 7.365. When our blood becomes acidic (as it often does in America thanks to our high consumption of acid-forming foods, liver/kidney stressors, and plain stressful lifestyles) it does what one would expect an acid to do in an environment designed to contain an alkaline substance and eats away at everything it touches, including, apparently, the hair. Pretty cool, really. Turns out the fix for grey hair is the same as fix for a whole plethora of actual health woes. :)

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