This vegetable can apparently make you lose hair… what?!

If you’re a regular reader of our blog posts, you’ll know by now that while we love giving you hair tips and more general advice, we’re also drawn into the weird and wonderful foods or products that can have an impact on your hair (if you don’t know what I mean, it’s worth going back and reading our “Chamomile tea does what to your hair?!” and “Why you should be eating more of this unusual ingredient for healthy hair” blog posts before this one. Today’s post, however, is going to be a little different, as we’re talking about a vegetable that has been found to be… wait for it- toxic to hair in some instances. Surprisingly, that vegetable is the humble pumpkin.

Apparently, according to French dermatologist Philippe Assouly, bitter-tasting pumpkins, and even butternut squash, can contain potent toxins which can cause hair loss. The doctor’s claims are backed up by two unusual cases in which women were poisoned by their dinners and lost most of their hair, which highlighted the "toxic association of alopecia (hair loss) with a common plant".

So, what can a bite of a bitter pumpkin or butternut squash actually do to you? Aside from causing hair loss, the veg will bring on the usual symptoms of food poisoning- expect severe severe vomiting, stomach cramps, diarrhoea, all the usual. But if you’ve eaten a lot of the culprit vegetable, Philippe Assouly’s findings suggest you may be losing more than just your appetite. In one of the cases, a woman swallowed a few mouthfuls of the roasted vegetable, which led her to loose most of her hair. The woman’s hair did eventually grow back, which is good to hear, but we can’t imagine the experience was too pleasant.

Another French woman developed cucurbit poisoning after eating some soup containing bitter butternut squash. She initially only experienced food poisoning symptoms, but started losing her hair about a week later. Two months after the incident, her hair had regrown less than 1 inch (2 centimeters).

Not such good news for pumpkin or squash lovers, we know, but before you go running for the hills and refuse to ever eat pumpkin or butternut squash again, fear not: bitter veg of these types is really rare, and you will only occasionally get a rogue squash/pumpkin/marrow which produces high levels of a toxin called cucurbitacin E, which is highly toxic to humans. The solution is fairly simple- if you discover your vegetable in question is bitter, throw it away and don’t eat any more. It’s worth spending 60p for another one, trust us.