Do you know what your NAILS say about your HEALTH?

Hi everyone! I think this is an important issue to share with all of you since we all care about our beauty, about our health, and since we all care so much about our nails appearance, being a man or a woman, we should definitely know more about them! Well for the surprise of all of us, our nails color and texture can reflect a wide range of medical conditions! You might be surprised what this has to do with nutrition but to me health and nutrition are very closely related! And most of the medical conditions mentioned in this text require a nutrition and specific diet intervention!

On an interview to WebMD, Dr. Joshua Fox, MD, director of Advanced Dermatology and a spokesman for the American Academy of Dermatology says he sometimes tries to guess if a person has anemia by looking at his or her nails. He explains that pale, whitish nail beds may indicate a low red blood cell count consistent with anemia. This is just one of the medical conditions that can be detected by taking a close look at your nails!

He lists the following 10 examples of nail changes that could indicate a serious medical condition.

What Your Nails Say About Your Health: 10 Possible Signs of Serious Conditions
Nail Appearance	Associated Condition
White nails	Liver diseases, such as hepatitis
Yellowish, thickened, slow-growing nails	Lung diseases, such as emphysema
Yellowish nails with a slight blush at the base	Diabetes
Half-white, half-pink nails	Kidney disease
Red nail beds	Heart disease
Pale or white nail beds	Anemia
Pitting or rippling of the nail surface	Psoriasis or inflammatory arthritis
"Clubbing," a painless increase in tissue around the ends of the fingers, or inversion of the nail	Lung diseases
Irregular red lines at the base of the nail fold	Lupus or connective tissue disease
Dark lines beneath the nail	Melanoma

However, nail changes are not always the first symptom of serious illness. Most patients will manifest other signs or symptoms of disease before nail changes become evident!

In addition, Laine, who is the senior deputy editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, notes that certain illnesses may cause nail changes in some patients but not in others. "For example, not all people with liver disease develop white nails," Laine tells WebMD. The reverse is true as well - not everyone with white nails has liver disease.

So stay calm, not a mere change in your nails should take you to the doctor, but if it persists, then yes, an appointment with your doctor could be more than beneficial to find out what’s wrong with you and treat it the sooner the better!

Samia Khoury Dietitian