No, McDonald’s Fries Won’t Cure Baldness.
A technical report on growing hair follicles in the lab was published this week as the discovery of a cure for hair loss in deep fat fryers at McDonald’s. “Japanese scientists say eating McDonald’s fries can cure baldness,” reports one Australian radio station. No, they don’t.
The study, titled Spontaneous In Vitro Hair Follicle (HFG) Embryo Formation Allowing Large Scale Production of HFG for Regenerative Medicine , was published in Biomaterials in November 2017. It doesn’t say anything about McDonald’s or cooking oil. … This is an account of how scientists developed a container that can grow thousands of hair follicles suitable for transplantation. Until now, there was no good way to create new hair follicles in the laboratory; Hair loss treatments most often simply move the hair from one part of the scalp to another.
The breakthrough was to find a material that would allow oxygen to enter cells. Here is what one of the study’s authors said in a press release sent by Yokohama National University on February 1:
“The key to mass production [of hair-producing stem cell clusters] was the selection of substrate materials for the culture vessel,” says Corresponding Author Junji Fukuda, a professor at Yokohama National University. “We used oxygen permeable dimethyl polysiloxane (PDMS) at the bottom of the culture vessel and it worked very well.”
Several media outlets picked up the story, but it didn’t make headlines until someone realized that dimethylpolysiloxane was also used in cooking oil to prevent foaming. Just a few weeks ago, McDonald’s released a video explaining the ingredients of the French fries , and they mentioned the additive in the name of transparency.
The Daily Mail reporter may have been the first to contact. (Difficult to piece together a story, but the timing is right.) Their story was published on February 4 and was titled “ Back and Free! Scientists say the chemical used in McDonald’s chips can cure POVERTY and even regrow hair . ” The next day, Express published the headline ” DISCOVERED: A baldness remedy hidden in McDonald’s FRIES” can grow hair without a transplant “ ” without citing the source for this quote – the whole point of the technique is to prepare hair follicles for transplantation. Dozens of reports followed, and while many media outlets accurately reported the details of the story, nearly all of them found a way to cram a mention of McDonald’s fries into the headline.
So let’s be clear: Scientists have used silicone to create their chip to grow hair cells. And McDonald’s uses silicone in their cooking oil. This is literally the only connection. Silicone is not an “ingredient” in a baldness “cure”. And certainly not “from” the cooking oil, as if the cooking oil were a natural resource to be mined.
The Japan Times reported on the hair growth study the day after, and be sure to ask about the McDonald’s connection. No, of course, not a single one:
Fukuda said he was confused by readers’ misinterpretations of his research.
“I’ve seen comments on the Internet asking, ‘How many fries do I need to eat to grow my hair? “” He said. “I would feel bad if people thought there was something like that!”