Doing Research for My Cancer Book

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 documentary I saw about alternative cancer therapies. Why was I watching it? Well, my latest book, My Wild Ride: How to Thrive after Breast Cancer and Infidelity,  is a comic self-help memoir, complete with cartoons, but it is also extensively researched. I embraced my anal BBC journalist background to reference about 70 books and more than 100 articles and studies. I 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? It sounded like a pretty exaggerated claim. 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 2018 that included more studies supporting their hypothesis. I bought a copy and to my amazement found the evidence they presented to be compelling.

Studies Linking Bras to Cancer

There is a wealth of global research supporting the bra-cancer link:

• 1991 Harvard study (CC Hsieh, D Trichopoulos (1991). “Breast size, handedness and breast cancer risk.” European Journal of Cancer and Clinical Oncology 27(2):131-135.). This study found that, “Premenopausal women who do not wear bras had half the risk of breast cancer compared with bra users…”
• 1991-93 U.S. Bra and Breast Cancer Study by Singer and Grismaijer, published in Dressed To Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras (Second Edition, Square One Publishers, 2018). Found that bra-free women have about the same incidence of breast cancer as men. 24/7 bra wearing increases incidence over 100 times that of a bra-free woman.
• Singer and Grismaijer did a follow-up study in Fiji, published in Get It Off! (ISCD Press, 2000). Found 24 case histories of breast cancer in a culture where half the women are bra-free. The women getting breast cancer were all wearing bras. Given women with the same genetics and diet and living in the same village, the ones getting breast disease were the ones wearing bras for work.
• A 2009 Chinese study (Zhang AQ, Xia JH, Wang Q, Li WP, Xu J, Chen ZY, Yang JM, “Risk factors of breast cancer in women in Guangdong and the countermeasures.” In Chinese. Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao. 2009 Jul;29(7):1451-3.) found that avoiding sleeping in a bra was protective against breast cancer, lowering the risk 60%.
• A 2012 study by Yao XY, Ni SS, Zhou J, Hu HY, Li LL, Wan F, Wang YK, Chen YD. entitled “A case-control study on risk factors of female breast cancer in Zhejiang province” was published in Zhejiang Da Xue Xue Bao Yi Xue Ban (2012 Sep;41(5):512-8. In Chinese. PMID: 23086643) The study found that bras with steel rings (I think this must be Chinglish for an underwire) and sleeping with bra were negatively related to breast cancer.
• 2015 “Comparative study of breast cancer risk factors at Kenyatta National Hospital and the Nairobi Hospital.” J. Afr. Cancer (2015) 7:41-46.  This study found a significant bra-cancer link in pre-and post-menopausal women.
• 2016 “Wearing a Tight Bra for Many Hours a Day is Associated with Increased Risk of Breast Cancer.” Adv Oncol Res Treat 1: 105. Based in Brazil, this is the first epidemiological study to look at bra tightness and time worn, and found a significant bra-cancer link.
• 2016 “Brassiere wearing and breast cancer risk: A systematic review and meta-analysis.” World J Meta-Anal. Aug 26, 2015; 3(4): 193-205. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the association between 8 areas of brassiere-wearing practices and the risk of breast cancer. Twelve case-control studies met inclusion criteria for review. The meta-analysis shows statistically significant findings to support the association between brassiere wearing during sleep and breast cancer risk.
• 2018 “Lymph stasis promotes tumor growth.” Journal of Dermatological Science. This confirms that alterations in regional lymphatic flow may produce dysregulation in skin immune function and consequent oncogenesis. Furthermore, lymphedematous areas appear to be immunologically vulnerable sites for the development of neoplasms as well as infections and immune-mediated diseases. In recent years, increasing evidence has confirmed this assumption.
• 2018 “How Bras Cause Lymph Stasis and Breast Cancer.” Academic.edu. This article discusses recent studies showing that lymph stasis causes cancer by reducing immune function and explains how constriction from tight bras results in lymphatic impairment in the breasts and an increased incidence of breast cancer.
• 2019  “Wearing Brassiere – A Less Well Known Factor Associated with Breast Cancer in Women.” Nurs Midwifery J 2019, 16(12) 891-901. The findings of this study revealed differences in some behavioral habits of wearing brassieres in women with and without breast cancer. So, in preventive interventions for breast cancer, women’s education should be considered in order to be aware of the proper behavioral habits in wearing brassieres.

How Can Bras Cause Cancer?

The Dressed to Kill 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 later were diagnosed with breast cancer.

Are Underwire Bras Worse?

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 many years ago, 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.

Mainstream Cancer Groups Do Not Accept Bra-Cancer Connection

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. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only research showing no bra-cancer connection and it is deeply flawed. This study included only postmenopausal women. Previous research, such as that Harvard study, had shown greater negative effects of bra-wearing in premenopausal women than in postmenopausal women. This is because of survival bias, in that the older ladies had already survived with or without bras, and those who might have died off by then from earlier breast cancers are not included in the study. More importantly, the 2014 study had 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.

If you search online for data about bras and cancer, Google and Bing will tell you that there is no link between bras and cancer, giving the 2014 Hutchinson Study results as evidence. In fact, when I debated the issue with ChatGPT, the AI not only denied the link but also invented non-existent studies to support that stance.

In February 2024, Dressed to Kill author, Sydney Ross Singer, began a campaign to have the flawed Hutchinson study retracted. This is in the light of a lot of new research in the field of biophysics and the biomechanics of the lymphatic system that backs up what Singer was researching back in the 1990s.

Breast Binding among Young Transgender Adults: Health Concerns

Given the potential damage bras may cause, I find the current fashion for nonbinary gender fluid biological females to bind their breasts to be exceedingly worrisome, especially in young women whose bodies are still developing. Are they dramatically increasing their chances of getting breast cancer? The jury is out on this issue, but in 2017, a study of the health impacts of chest binding among transgender adults was published in the journal Culture, Health & Sexuality. It found that 97% of the 1800 participants who bound their chest daily had at least one negative symptom. Side effects they reported included back and chest pain, shortness of breath, a buildup of fluid in the lungs, reduced exercise tolerance and even broken ribs. For more on this issue, read my blog, “Are Gender Affirming Practices Carcinogenic?”

Why I Care about Reducing My Cancer Risk

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.

Going Bra-less

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. I have adjusted my wardrobe to favor clothing that doesn’t show my nipples. Alternatively,  to avoid the bump of my nipples showing through the fabric of clothing,  I sometimes 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 would 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. These days, I prefer to simply hang loose wearing clothing that is not too revealing. I’ve written a separate blog with some tips  to help you if breaking up with your bra is hard to do.

Is this Blog Too Hot to Handle?

As a Thrive Global contributor, I used to submit some of my writing to Thrive Global’s Community blog. Everything I sent them got published, except for this article, an earlier version of which I sent them back in 2021. Sadly, they flagged this blog on bras as inappropriate and rejected it. It was obviously too hot for them to handle. However, Thrive Global accepted a related article I wrote, entitled, “A Brief History of Dogma Masquerading as Science.”

On the July 16, 2021 episode of the Java Delight podcast, hosts Brandon Croucher and Gavin Kerr were happy to discuss the bras and breast cancer link—we even managed to find humor in the subject.

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