What Your Fingernails Say About Your Health

Nail Signs of Zinc Deficiency 0:00

Did you know that there are some signals on your body that can tell you if you're deficient in some nutrients? I'm an naturopathic doctor, so I love helping people to get their nutrition high and to digestion really healthy and functioning well so that you can absorb nutrients from your food. So let's look at some of these. The first one's super easy. It's on you fingernails. Take a look your fingernail and see if there any little white dots. And the white dots look like this and they are usually horizontal lines.

Sometimes if you've like smashed your finger in a car door, of course there's going to be a markup from that. So don't count those ones. But if see a lot of those little white lines, those can be signs of zinc deficiency. And zinc is super important for men's health especially. It's great for fertility in general. If you don' have a lots of animal protein in your diet, especially if your a vegan, Zinc is not very common in the diet or it's not as easy to get to. Oysters are the main powerhouse of getting zinc in a diet.

So if there's a bunch of little white spots on there, that could be a nutrient deficiency for zinc. Now, I like to always give this disclaimer with zinc, but as you know, consult with your own naturopath or your doctor or nutritionist about this for you and the specifics. But if you end up taking a zinc supplement, let's say, you watch this video and you're super excited, be sure that it has copper in there as well because zinc and copper work synergistically. So if take zinc all by itself, your body will still be very happy about it most of the time, but for it to absorb appropriately and for to keep that balance in your having zinc with a little bit of copper.

It's a really good place to start. Let's look at the nails a little bit more. So this one, you might just know this about your nails already, but if they're brittle or tend to splinter, that can be a nutrient deficiency at large, But it can indicate just a couple of specific things.

Brittle and Spoon-Shaped Nails 1:56

It could be iron deficiency, it could biotin deficiency or vitamin B7. It can also sometimes mean just calcium or other minerals are deficient. So brittle nails isn't necessarily a tried and true sign of one particular thing, but brittle nail in general can mean that there's a weakening in the structure and it can use some more nutrients. So always important to do further testing to figure out for sure if any of these neutral deficiencies are true for you. But it can be a good place to start. Well, iron is really a fun one because there are a couple of other things that can show if you're iron deficient.

One of them, which is a classic iron deficiency nail type, is the spoon shaped nail. And this is very much like looks like a spoon, a little concave shape. This is if you have nails that are this shape, probably been a while that you haven't had iron. But you know, it's good to check. Good to good. It could also be vitamin C. Vitamin C and iron work in the same way that copper and zinc do. They help each other out. vitamin c especially helps iron get absorbed even better. That's one of the main things that spoon-shaped nails because it could mean an iron deficiency or it would mean a vitamin C deficiency.

And since they go so well together, they can go hand in hand. Why not feed two birds with one seed? So the spoon shaped nails, that can be really interesting to look at too. Let's do one more thing on the nails. So this one, the Take a look more closely and you might even feel your fingernails like rub the soft part of your finger pad along your nail and see if you can feel some vertical ridges. If you could feel vertical ridge, that could also be a sign of iron deficiency, but it could be protein deficiency too.

That one is kind of interesting. And you might just notice, oh, maybe I've never felt my nails before. It's interesting to see if there's different texture on each of the different nail types. So nails can be a first good place to start.

Keratosis Pilaris and Vitamin A 3:56

If you notice some of those patterns, take a mental note of it. I always, always recommend testing to know for sure. These can a good places to stop. And I'll actually drop in the description here in comments some tests that you can do to see for sure if you have some of these deficiencies, like looking more specifically at iron, protein, and zinc. But let's talk about another nutrient deficiency. This one is called keratosis pilaris. These ones you might know more familiarly as bumps on the back of the arms.

So go ahead and feel the backs of arms and see if there's any smoothness, any bumps. This one is a common sign of vitamin A deficiency or omega threes. Oh, here's one more where they work together synergistically. Omega threes are fatty acids. They are most commonly in fatty fish. The fattiest fish are the ones that live in the coldest waters, so salmon mackerel, sardines, these have a lot of omega-3s in them. Because they're a healthy fat, vitamin A is absorbed better with omega 3s, because vitamin a is a fat soluble vitamin.

So there's four fat-soluble vitamins, Vitamin A, D, E, and K. Usually the bumps on the backs of the arms only happen with the vitamin-A and omega threes. So if you're like, oh no, I have bumps on the backs of my arms, maybe compete two birds with one seed with the vitamin A and omega-3s together, since the omega 3s will help the, uh, vitamin a absorb better. So that one's a fun one. And you might be thinking, or at least from my, my naturopathic brain gets going and I'm like all of these deficiencies and be so, so common for, for people to, to have, but especially if your on a plant-based diet, I love plant-based eating, I think it's incredible.

I used to be a vegetarian for many years, and I was even a vegan for a portion of that. And I still would love to, be I'm not anymore. But I chose that way of eating because it felt good to me ethically. It felt aligned with my values. and i also just love vegetables, like a good natural bath. I noticed that when I was eating that way, I didn't feel very good. First of all, it was just tired and floated quite often. But I had all of these. Well, not quite the spoon shaped nails, but I have brittle nails.

I've had a lot of those red bumps. And this is the last nutrient deficiency that we'll talk about, but I had a ton of canker sores.

Mouth Signs of B12 Deficiency 6:32

And so it is so important to find out what eating pattern works well for your body, what works best for you. So doing more specific testing can be so helpful just to see what is your your nutrient deficient. Or maybe is there something that you're putting into your body or not putting it into the body that doesn't align very well. So one of the tests that I'll put in the description here is also a food intolerance test. Because at the time when I was a vegetarian and a vegan, I wasn't eating, well when i was vegetarian especially, i wasn' eating any meat.

I eating a ton of eggs and soy as my main protein sources. turned out I have a food intolerance to both eggs and saline. So no wonder I didn't feel very good. It's so important to find out what works well on your system. With the other piece, this other deficiency that we can look for is actually on the mouth. If you've got a mirror or your phone nearby, take a look. There's a couple of things we could look here. One of them is something called glossitis, and it's where the tongue gets really quite red.

This could mean a couple of things. It doesn't necessarily mean nutrient deficiency, but if the tone is really bright red and also maybe a little bit tender, that can be a sign of B12 deficiency. B-12 shows up a lot in the mouth, B12 deficiency can also cause something called angular oculitis, where the corners of the mouth are pretty easily cracked. This is different than like a cold sore or something like that, but it can really be when the cracks keep happening or they get deep, they can get painful.

That can be a B-12-deficiency sign too. The last one that you can come and see sometimes with B 12 deficiency is those mouth ulcers that I was mentioning that it used to get. Uh, canker sores are sometimes what they're called or apthosulcers. So, so painful. And I remember when I used get them, I, there would be the size of a dime and they would last for about five weeks. Thankfully that doesn't happen anymore. I usually just don't get that. But if I get done, they don' get big and don''t stay that long just because I've worked on this nutrient palette and got myself more balanced.

But if you have canker sores, I'm so sorry. I feel for you. So the beefy tongue, the cuts on the edges of the lips, cankers sore that come pretty frequently or they don't go away very fast, those can all be B12 cells. It's so interesting to notice how the body is so intelligent and it tells us these things on these physical signs before we even have to do a test. But testing can let us know for sure. and it lets you know how much of a repletion needs to happen. So check out the test and what I'd like to recommend too is talk with someone.

Talk with a health professional to see if these are aligning. I offer free 15-minute phone consultations and I'll put the link in the description as well. Love to connect with you and see any of these signs are showing up for you or if you'd like to do some further testing. It can really be a powerful roadmap to help you figure out what's your body need to rebalance. So check out those links. In the next video, we'll talk about some simple tricks to increase digestion because sometimes it's something that you're maybe not getting in your diet.

Maybe you are not having enough nutrition there. But sometimes it's the body's not absorbing those nutrients. The digestive system isn't pulling them in from your food. So that's where the rubber meets the road on looking at these colors from a nutrition standpoint and a gut health standpoint, and finding that middle ground so that you can get all the nutrition from you food, if you're taking the efforts to eat healthy, you want to make sure that your absorbing them too. Definitely check out the next video for a simple trick to increase digestive health and increase absorption of your foods.