Dry hair and hair loss have a way of announcing themselves at the worst possible moment: in the bathroom mirror, first thing in the morning, with a tangle of strands coiled in the sink drain to drive the point home. Anyone who has run their fingers through hair that feels more like straw than silk knows the small jolt of alarm that follows — the quiet question of whether this is the beginning of something worse.

Most people respond the way the market has trained them. They cycle through shampoos that promise to stop shedding and stimulate growth, each more expensive than the last. They try the folk remedies that circulate endlessly online — ginger juice rubbed into the scalp, serums dabbed onto thinning patches — and often end up with an irritated, reddened scalp and the same amount of hair in the drain. In much of the Chinese-speaking world, the first answer to hair trouble is almost reflexive: black sesame paste and black soybean milk, consumed dutifully, bowl after bowl, for months. The usual result is a few extra pounds on the scale and a head of hair that carries on shedding exactly as before. None of this means food is the wrong lever; it simply means most people are pulling the wrong one.

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