There’s a reason this theory has been rejected by actual medical science-y types.
Gwyneth Paltrow, 43, went through seven long years of med school so we should all heed her advice when it comes to matters of health and wellbeing.*
Just in time for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop has published a story written by Dr Habib Sadeghi that claims wearing a tight bra can cause breast cancer.
Dr Sadeghi’s 2,700-word post states that wearing a tight bra could restrict the lymph nodes around the breast thereby preventing “toxins from being processed through them and flushed out of the body.”
Dr Sadeghi pointed to research conducted in the early ’90s by medical anthropologists Sydney Ross Singer and Soma Grismaijer that found “women who wore their bras 24 hours per day increased their breast cancer risk by 125 times over women who rarely or never wore a bra” as evidence.
The doctor noted a later study conducted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that found zero connection between bras and breast cancer but dismissed it.
“The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center receives money annually from a fundraising event called the Bra Dash, a 5k run during which women wear pink bras on the outside of their clothes to raise money for research. Perhaps the researchers felt it was inappropriate to implicate bras in breast cancer when they’re used to raise money for the institution,” he writes, which is a fairly terrible thing to imply.
Underwire bras could also cause cancer through radiation, according to Dr Sadeghi.
“While the fact that your bra could absorb and intensify radiation seems preposterous, it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds,” he writes.
He recommends getting rid of your wifi connection, never carrying a mobile phone in your bra or breast pocket, and buying bras without an underwire.