Claim: Hair care products used predominantly by African-American women have been linked to higher rates of breast cancer.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2005]
Lifestyles Report...Hair Scare by Debbie Norrell At least two months ago WPXI contacted me to do an interview about ingredients in hair care products used by African-Americans possibly leading to breast cancer. I was selected because I am a 15-year breast cancer survivor. I agreed to do the interview. However at the end of the taping I didn't know anything more about the study than before the cameras started rolling. Recently WAMO news anchor and New Pittsburgh Courier freelance writer Allegra Battle did a story on this same subject and it was a feature on the May 9, 5 p.m. KDKA news. But at the end of these stories we still did not have a list of the products. Battle gave me the list that didn't make her feature during a recent visit I made to the WAMO studio's promoting the Pittsburgh Race for the Cure. So many of my friends have seen the stories on television or read about this issue in the paper and they want to know which products to be concerned about. However I wanted to give you more so I went to the Internet and looked for articles from the Center for Environmental Oncology and found one titled: Why Healthy People Get Cancer: Center Examines Environmental Suspects (update spring 2005). The article stated, one of immediate research priorities of the new center is the puzzling phenomenon of breast cancer in African-Americans under the age of 40, who have nearly twice as much breast cancer as do white women. The center will work with Silent Spring Institute, a Massachusetts based cancer institute, to identify suspect contaminants and ingredients in hair care products and other personal products regularly used by African-American young women and their mothers. More recently, attention has turned to estrogenic compounds in hair care products used by Black women as a possible explanation for higher cancer rates in this population. I've started to carry copies of the list in my purse but we're going to share it with you right here. The list simply says: The following is a list of products that have previously been found to contain hormones: Placenta Shampoo Queen Helene Placenta cream hair conditioner Placenta revitalizing shampoo Perm Repair with placenta Proline Perm Repair with placenta Hormone hair food Jojoba oil, Triple action super grow, Supreme Vita-Gro Luster's Sur Glo Hormone B & B Super Gro Lekair Natural Super Glo Lekair Hormone hair treatment with Vitamin E Isoplus Hormone hair treatment with Quinine Fermodyl with Placenta hair conditioner Supreme Vita-Gro with allantoin and estrogen plus TEA-COCO Hask Placenta Hair conditioner Nu Skin body smoother Nu Skin Enhancer The majority of these products contain placental extract, placenta, hormones or estrogen. As early as 1983 Dr. Devra Davis (epidemiologist and director of the Center for Environmental oncology, part of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute) and co-researcher Leon Bradlow advanced the theory that xenoestrogens, synthetic estrogen imitators, were a possible cause of breast cancer. Davis also says, "most cases of breast cancer are not born, but made and the more hormones a woman is exposed to in her lifetime, the greater her risk of breast cancer." We need to be more cautious of the products that we use on our hair and our bodies and demand that more information about our health is shared. Ladies and gentlemen beware. |
Origins: Research in progress.
Last updated: 20 July 2005