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A Pinch of Cancer: Can Wearing a Bra Kill You?
by William Thomas
If you didn’t burn yours in the ‘Sixties, you might want to put it away now. “Bras cause breast cancer. It’s open and shut,” says medical researcher Syd Singer.
The Singers became breast cancer sleuths in 1991. On the day Soma discovered a lump in her breast, the husband-wife team was studying the effects of Western medicine on Fijians. In the shower, Syd noticed that Soma’s shoulders and breasts were outlined by dark red grooves. He remembered a puzzled Fijian woman asking his wife about her brassiere:
“Doesn’t it feel tight?”
“You get used to it,” Soma had replied.
Could bras be constricting breast tissue, Syd wondered, hampering lymph drainage and causing degeneration?
After 15 or 20 years of bra-constricted lymph drainage, cancer can result.
Looking at other cultures, they didn’t find peasant women wearing push-up bras. Instead, they discovered that the Maoris of New Zealand integrated into white culture have the same rate of breast cancer, while Australia’s marginalized aboriginals have virtually no breast cancer. The same trend held for “Westernized” Japanese, Fijians and other bra-converted cultures.
In Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras, the researchers also observed that just before a woman begins her period, estrogen floods her system, causing her breasts to swell. If she continues wearing the same bra size, life-saving lymphatics will be even more tightly squished. Had they found the “estrogen link” to breast cancer?
Even worse, a young woman’s coming of age is often “marked” by her first bra. Like the ancient Chinese practice of foot-binding, “breast-binding” at puberty can eventually lead to severe medical complications.
Could bras be the “missing link” in a growing epidemic of breast cancer? Beginning in May, 1991, Soma and Syd Singer’s 30-month “Bra and Breast Cancer” study interviewed some 4,000 women in five major US cities. All were Caucasian of mostly “medium income” ranging in age from 30 to 79. Half had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
Almost all of the women interviewed were unhappy with the size or shape of their breasts. Women who chose a bra for appearance, ignoring soreness and swelling, had twice the rate of breast cancer of those who did not.
But the most startling statistic was that three out of four women who wore their daytime bras to sleep contracted breast cancer. So did one out seven women strapped into a bra more than 12 hours a day.
“Don’t sleep in your bra!” Syd Singer pleads. “Women who want to avoid breast cancer should wear a bra for the shortest period of time possible — certainly for less than 12 hours daily.”
Syd Singer says that establishment censorship of the bra-breast cancer connection is killing women. Pointing to the biggest commonality among breast cancer patients, he’s emphatic that it’s bra-squeezed lymphatics.
At the first frightening sign of a lump, an angry Syd Singer says, “women should take their bras off before they take their breasts off.” Why wait, when you can liberate your lymphatics now.
IF YOU MUST WEAR A BRA:
Make sure you can slip two fingers under the shoulder-straps and side-panels. Don’t wear this disastrous device to sleep. Take it off at home. Massage your breasts every time you remove your bra. Sing your lymphatics into health — or at least breathe deeply.
Try the Cozy Sports Bra. As one customer commented, "The Cozy Sports Bra© is like sneakers for your Boobs!"
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