McDonald’s Fries Could Possibly Rid You of Baldness
The solution to your baldness could be hiding in those greasy, fries-grabbing hands of yours.
Golden. Warm. Crunchy. Yet so soft.. fries are the ultimate irresistible temptation. Now there’s more news to fuel your love for this greasy goodness.
A team of Japanese scientists claim to have mass produced ‘hair follicle germs’ (HFGs) – which fuel hair development – for the first time; that too, using a chemical called dimethylpolysiloxane (DMPS), which- and as an informed consumer, you already know is used in McDonald’s cooking oil.
The product is used in the fast food chain to prevent cooking oil from foaming.
A stem cell research team from Yokohama National University have used a “simple” method to regrow hair on mice with dimethylpolysiloxane. The preliminary tests have indicated the ground-breaking method is likely to be just as successful when transferred to human skin cells.
“This simple method is very robust and promising,” said Junji Fukuda, one of the study’s authors. “We hope that this technique will improve human hair regenerative therapy to treat hair loss such as androgenic alopecia.”
“The key for the mass production of HFGs was a choice of substrate materials for the culture vessel. We used oxygen-permeable dimethylpolysiloxane (PDMS) at the bottom of culture vessel, and it worked very well.
”The technique created 5,000 HFGs simultaneously. The research team then seeded the prepared HFGs from an HFG chip, a fabricated, approximately 300-microwell array, onto the mouse’s body.
“These self-sorted hair follicle germs were shown to be capable of efficient hair-follicle and shaft generation upon injection into the backs of nude mice,” Fukuda said.
The scientists say that the key to producing lots of HFGs at once was the materials they used in the process: oxygen-permeable dimethylpolysiloxane. The chemical itself doesn’t help hair growth, but it’s used as a base for the process to work most effectively. They found they were able to grow black hair on the backs and scalps of mice.
To be clear, there’s no evidence (yet) that a regular diet of McDonald’s fries will stop baldness. The chemical in the study isn’t the chemical that triggers hair growth; it simply helps the process along.
