Your Hair Is Bleaching Itself From the Inside (Here's the Fix)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]The same chemical hair dressers use to bleach hair is being made inside your own follicles. As we age, our body stops clearing it and that's a major reason our hair turns gray. A landmark 2009 study used extremely fancy spectroscopy to look inside gray hair shafts. They found that gray and white hair follicles accumulate hydrogen peroxide with almost no catalase, the enzyme that normally breaks down hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. The excess hydrogen peroxide then damages tyrosinase itself, the enzyme that builds melanin. Pigment production falls, hair grows in gray.

[00:00:33]Our body has a backup system for clearing hydrogen peroxide, glutathione, our master antioxidant. The rate-limiting amino acid for making glutathione is cysteine and the most efficient way to feed cysteine into that pathway is N-acetylcysteine or NAC. NAC raises intracellular glutathione, which helps neutralize hydrogen peroxide that catalase can no longer keep up with.

[00:00:55]Most clinical research on NAC uses 600 to 1200 mg daily. I take 600 mg every morning, but I cycle it. Couple of months on, 1 month off. The bonus, NAC also raises nitric oxide, which improves scalp blood flow, relevant if you're also fighting thinning. Copper builds pigment, NAC protects pigment. The third piece, a leaf that boosts the exact enzyme your gray follicles are missing.

[00:01:18]But that's the next video.