The link between wearing a bra and breast cancer is stronger than that between smoking and lung cancer. That’s what I heard in a recent documentary I watched about alternative cancer therapies. Working on my forthcoming book, Hotel Chemo: My Wild Ride through Breast Cancer and Infidelity, I’ve researched the whole gamut of both conventional and alternative treatments, including an attempt by an alternative MD to cure a woman’s abdominal pain-which was actually colon cancer-by playing the digeridoo to get rid of an entity he claimed was inside her. Not surprisingly, this technique failed. The patient then went to her local ER, had surgery to remove the tumor and thankfully, lived to tell the tale. So, bras are worse than cigarettes? Surely not? Sounds like a pretty exaggerated claim, I thought. Where does it come from? Well, the issue was brought to light by medical anthropologist Sydney Ross Singer in a book that he and his wife, Soma Grismaijer, wrote in 1994, with the unforgettable title, Dressed to Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. The authors produced a second edition in 2017 that included more studies supporting their hypothesis. I bought a copy and to my amazement found the evidence they presented to be compelling.
The authors do not deny that toxins in the modern environment play a major part in creating cancer in humans. However, toxins collect in fatty tissue in the body, and where do all women have fatty tissue? In the breasts. Normally waste products and toxins would be flushed out by the lymphatic system, but a bra compresses the breasts and the sides of the body near the armpits. The garment also constricts the shoulders where the straps tend to dig in and squeezes the area underneath the breast, particularly if an underwire bra is worn. All this compression, according to Singer and Grismaijer, blocks lymph flow, so the toxins stay in the breast which leads to pain, cysts and tumor growth. Bras also heat up the breast tissue, which apparently also causes cancer. Various studies show a strong relationship between the number of hours a bra is worn daily and the likelihood of breast cancer. Dr. Habib Sadeghi, who wrote the Foreword to Dressed to Kill, describes some of these studies and goes into more detail about the health problems associated with wearing a bra in a September 24, 2019 article on Medium. It has the rather tentative title, Could There Possibly Be a Link Between Bras and Breast Cancer?
From 1991 to 1993, Singer and Grismaijer carried out the Bra and Breast Cancer Study, in which 4,730 women from five cities in the US were interviewed about their bra usage. Roughly half the group had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Singer reports, “This study concluded that bra-free women have about the same risk of breast cancer as men, while the tighter and longer the bra is worn the higher the risk rises, to 125 times higher for a 24/7 bra user compared to a bra-free woman.” Singer and Grismaijer also did research in Fiji, where they say there was apparently no breast cancer at all until women began to wear Western clothing, particularly in the workplace. The Fijian women who began wearing brassieres in were the ones who were later diagnosed with breast cancer.
I wondered whether the underwire in a bra might cause also problems by acting as an antenna to attract electromagnetic fields (EMF), a possibility that is briefly mentioned in Dressed to Kill. This speculation of mine arose from a bizarre turn of events when my primary-school-aged youngest son, Arthur, was fitted with orthodontic headgear and wore it at night for the first time. The next morning, he told me he was terrified and had been having horrible nightmares. He was convinced that an evil monster had taken up residence in his closet. The following morning, Arthur declared that the nasty entity was still there. Some “ghost hunters” insist that you can detect such supernatural phenomena by looking for areas of EMF activity. So, on the third night, before my son was about to go to bed, I checked out his room with an EMF meter. There was no EMF activity in his closet, but I detected very high readings in a straight line across the ceiling, right by his bed. I later discovered that these high readings only appeared when his brother, whose bedroom was adjoining, had his computer turned on. I theorized that the wire in my son’s orthodontic headgear had become a receiver for EMF from the electrical wiring in the ceiling which had created a disturbance that his brain had interpreted as a monster in the closet. I had to ensure that his brother’s computer was turned off in the evening to ensure that Arthur got a good night’s sleep with no more nightmares.
Sadly, mainstream cancer groups have not only ignored the incriminating data against bras but actively denied it. They have trumpeted a study done in 2014 that showed no link between bras and cancer. This research included only postmenopausal women, whom other studies had shown to be less dramatically affected by bra usage than premenopausal women, and more importantly, there was no control group of women who did not wear bras. That’s like studying the relationship between smoking and lung cancer without including any non-smokers to compare to the smokers!
I’ve had breast cancer twice, once on each side, and I’m a carrier of the dreaded BRCA gene. I turned down a double mastectomy to the consternation of some of my friends, and opted for lumpectomy surgery both times. The last thing I wanted to do was to continue to create an environment for cancer to thrive again. But was I ready to burn my bras? I had been conditioned from youth to wear them. I remember how proud I was when I got my first training bra, with practically nothing there to fill its cups. In an office setting, it felt very unprofessional to go bra-less. Working as a reporter in the BBC, if the bumps of my nipples had been visible through my clothing, it would have really put me off my stride to interview politicians, celebrities and other people of note. I would have lost all credibility in their eyes. I’d also been led to believe that wearing a bra was essential to look attractive to the opposite sex. It is a garment designed to perk up your boobs and stop them sagging down to the nether regions. It can make a woman look younger and curvaceous in all the right places. A bra shows off your cleavage and stops your boobs bouncing about all over the place, especially if you’re playing sports. In my high school days, I used to play tennis with a girl who always went bra-less. It seemed that her breasts moved about more than the tennis ball.
I first decided to avoid underwire bras, even though they seem to do a better job of holding things up than those without them. Soon I was finding the underwire style too tight and uncomfortable to wear. Many women sleep in a bra, and research seems to show that the more hours the garment is worn the greater the breast cancer risk. So I made sure that whatever I wore in bed was loose and unconstricting. No tight, sexy negligee. Instead, I went for the frumpy grandma look and could have fitted a whole family inside my nightgown. These days, if I’m out doing something work-oriented, I’ll wear a bra with no underwire, but I prefer going bra-less. However, I don’t like seeing the bump of my nipples showing through the fabric of clothing, so I tend to cover them with gel petals to prevent them being visible. But who knows? Maybe the silicone those nipple covers are made from is toxic too? Some women have had rashes from using adhesive silicone bras, which have breathability problems and are not recommended to be worn for more than eight hours at a time. I have never had any rashes from the nipple covers but I prefer to be au naturel at home. I only wear the things when I’m going out. They sometimes fall off at the most embarrassing times. There I am, out with friends, in a store or at a meeting, and one of my nipple petals is bulging out of my clothing at my belly button or has dropped out onto the floor. Etiquette books don’t really cover how to deal with this situation. I suppose I just need to hang loose.
Excerpted from CJ Grace’s forthcoming book, Hotel Chemo: My Wild Ride through Breast Cancer and Infidelity.
Photo © 2021 CJ Grace.
Originally published at https://www.adultererswife.com on May 18, 2021.
