Hello, welcome to Age Better with me, Lizale. Well, Monday is here. It's the time of the week where I hear from you, your questions, your thoughts, your opinions. And I just love going through them every week. It's a lucky dip, opening the post bag, getting a peek into your worlds and helping you, hopefully, in any way that I can. So if you do have a question that you'd like my help with,

please get in touch.

All the contact details are in the episode description and at the end of the show.

Well, coming up today, Jane is looking for tips or products to help with her dry hair.

I'll be helping Anna navigate the world of daily supplements. And Bazina wants to know the best way

to use DNA testing to optimise health and well-being. Very interesting subject that one. Then I will be

suggesting ways for Lydia to increase her protein and fibre intake. Yeah, because we all know how important they are.

And finally, I'll be talking about if you can use HRT as a contraceptive.

Well, let's start today with Jane's question. And you ask, can you give me any top tips or products to improve dry hair in my menopausal 50s?

Oh, Jane, so common.

You know, the first thing I want to say is this, dry hair in menopause is a hormonal shift.

So this is how our hair changes.

As our estrogen declines, several things happen at once. We lose sebum production. That means that our hair loses its natural lubrication. Our hair fibers become finer, more fragile, less shiny. Our growth cycle slow and hair may shed more easily after stress for example and our scalp itself it becomes

drier more sensitive which affects the quality of her growing from it so you might have had hair

that once behaved beautifully but now it can all of a sudden feel coarse or brittle or frizzy permanently

thirsty if you like even if you haven't changed a thing.

So what can we do? Well, hair is metabolically expensive tissue and in midlife, it's often

underfueled. We need to refuel it. So key internal supporters include protein. Our hair is made of

keratin and that's a protein. Many women

simply aren't getting enough and when we do eat protein, the body is obviously going to

prioritise it where it really needs it and its hair is going to get it lost because that's not

really life critical, is it? We also need things like healthy fats. So our omega-3s, good old extra version olive oil,

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