If you’ve confronted thinning hair or outright hair loss, you know the feeling: scrambling to find a way to slow the progression, wondering what you could be doing to prevent bald spots or further hairline erosion. It’s estimated that the average person loses 50-100 hairs a day, but if you’ve got a pattern of hair loss in your family or the years are adding up, it’s likely you may be fighting an uphill battle- at least until now.

There is some scientific consensus that beyond genetics and aging, nutrition or poor eating habits could play a role in your hair loss. Because the health of your hair is directly tied to the health of your scalp and hair follicles, it’s clear that ingesting the right kinds of nutrients will allow your body to better sustain healthy hair growth. So what should you be eating? One recent post from Longevity suggests a variety of fruits to help the cause while Medical News Today has a broader list of recommended foods to support hair growth.

But perhaps the most exciting idea for promoting and sustaining new hair growth comes out of recent lab work at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego. Scientists there were recently able to grow natural looking hair through skin by using pluripotent stem cells. While this breakthrough was accomplished in mice, there is palpable excitement that this is a critically important step in addressing human hair loss, so much so that a new company, Stemson Therapeutics, has been formed to bring this product to market for people. So pull out your hairbrush and read more about this research here.