Food for Thought with Colleen Patrick-Goudreau · Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

Hair Loss and Hormones

·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

Colleen shares her harrowing hair loss experience that started in 2018, leaving her devastated before a trip to France.

Hair changes get treated gently here. The host starts with hair loss and hair growth, then widens the frame to nutrients, genetics, and hormones without pretending there is one neat answer. She takes her time. Community support, her book, one-on-one sessions, and a 2025 online conference sit beside the health story instead of feeling tacked on. That pacing fits the show. Care for listeners and care for the topic blur together, so the practical updates feel like part of the relationship. Then the fear gets specific. The host remembers looking at options that sounded intense, including a treatment with blood, a centrifuge, plasma, and injections into the scalp. She was not ready for that. Rogaine gave her pause too, because the label suggested that stopping could mean losing any growth gained from the product. That reaction lands. A treatment that may need lifelong use stops feeling like a simple fix and starts feeling like a deal she did not want to sign. Stress comes in carefully. Friends suspected it, but the host pushes back on treating ordinary low-level stress as the default explanation. She draws a cleaner line. Stress-related hair loss, as she understands it, tends to follow a major physical or emotional shock, not the background hum of daily pressure. Severe illness, severe weight loss, surgery, childbirth, death of a loved one, divorce, and other emotional trauma all belong in that frame. She stays modest about expertise. She says she was not an expert then and is not one now, but she keeps asking which kind of stress fits. The episode closes with hair care. Plain Products enters as zero waste, vegan, cruelty-free care that works for her. The ending is practical and kind. Hair, health, shopping choices, and animal ethics share the same table without making a big speech about it.

As heard by us

A steady, practical look at hair loss that favors causes over easy assumptions.

Hair loss is treated as a practical problem rather than a cosmetic one here. Colleen Patrick-Goudreau works through the likely causes without pretending there is a single answer, and the discussion stays useful when it turns to Rogaine, platelet-rich plasma, and the uneasy…

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Why you'd press play

If hair loss has you searching for causes at 1 a.m., start here.

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