Do Chemical Hair Relaxers REALLY Cause Fibroids in Black Women?

Black women suffer from uterine fibroids at a rate that is two to three times greater than that of  their white counterparts.  Medical researchers have for years been stumped by the disparity.  Then, an article appeared in a 2011 edition of the prestigious American Journal of Epidemiology.  It asserted that the chemicals in hair relaxers used by African-American women to straighten their hair is the culprit.

Yes, we as black women should indeed lay off the relaxer for a whole host of reasons.  But hoping to shrink uterine fibroids is not one of them.

Is an Unacknowledged Eurocentric Paradigm Widening Ethnic Disparities in U.S. Health Care?

African-Americans consume substantially less than the recommended daily intake of calcium and yet have the densest bone mass of any American ethnic group, and are at the lowest risk of osteoporosis, fragile bone disease and other calcium deficiency disorders. Studies have shown that this occurs because blacks have higher rates of calcium retention and greater calcium utilization efficiency than other ethnicities. So what public health message is given to black parents?  It is that their children suffer from calcium deficiency and should therefore be fed more dairy products in order to prevent osteoporosis. But what might the implications be of pushing high sodium, high fat dairy products on a population that is not in need of supplemental calcium but that is suffering from skyrocketing rates of juvenile obesity and salt-sensitive hypertension?  The medical response is that those ailments are probably caused by a calcium-deficiency as well. 

     

Why Some Populations May Be Genetically Immune to Osteoporosis

As an evolutionary historian, I have devoted the last several years to researching the health implications of genetic diversity. I was particularly concerned with the tendency of medical researchers to unwittingly use the biology of people with Northern European ancestry as a universal standard for everyone. For instance, lactose intolerance may be a disorder in that community, which suffers high rates of osteoporosis. But since 65% of the world’s population are lactose intolerant and have low rates of osteoporosis, a one-size-fits-all approach to bone health can prove dangerous for those whose ethnic-specific biological needs are overlooked.

In June of 2016, I published an article in NATURE: BoneKEy, showing that osteoporosis is not a global problem. It has a strong and devastating impact in dairy-farming societies and is virtually non-existent in the tsetse zone of West Africa, where cattle rearing and dairying are not possible. Previous studies have tried to correlate the degenerative bone disease with socio-economic income. However, this study compares two regions of Africa with similar socio-economic conditions. In dairy-farming East Africa, the incidence of osteoporosis is 245 per 100,000. However in the tsetse belt of West Africa, where people do not consume dairy products, it is 3 per 100,000. When regression analyses are performed on 40 countries around the world, the association between dairy consumption and osteoporosis is high (0.851). It only correlates with national Gross National Product at a regression rate of 0.447.