McDonald’s french fries not only cures hunger, but also hair loss, according to a team of Japanese university scientists.
In a recent study published in the journal Biomaterials, a chemical added to McDonald’s fries to stop the cooking oil from frothing can also help with the stimulation of hair growth.
A stem cell research team at Yokohama National University were able to successfully mass produce 5,000 hair follicle germs (HFGs) for the first time after using dimethylpolysiloxane, a silicone, to regrow hair on mice.
“These self-sorted hair follicle germs were shown to be capable of efficient hair-follicle and shaft generation upon intracutaneous transplantation into the backs of nude mice,” Professor Junji Fukuda said in the study. “We demonstrated that the integrity of the oxygen supply through the bottom of the silicone chip was crucial to enabling both ssHFG formation and subsequent hair shaft generation.”
The next steps in the research process would be to test the chemical on human skin cells.
“This simple method is very robust and promising,” Fukuda told the Daily Record. “We hope this technique will improve human hair regenerative therapy to treat hair loss such as androgenic alopecia (male pattern baldness). In fact, we have preliminary data that suggests human HFG formation using human keratinocytes and dermal papilla cells.”
According to StopPoisoningUs.org, dimethylpolysiloxane can also be found in other fast food restaurants including Subway, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell, KFC, Burger King, Arby’s and more.
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Under high temperatures, it is known to degrade into compounds such as formaldehyde, dangerous carcinogen often used for embalming.
Twitter users chimed in with their thoughts about rubbing french fry oil on a bald head.
Featured Image via Flickr / Nelo Hotsuma (CC BY 2.0)
