Are you eating right? Why not ask your hair?
Pierre Beaumier is a chemist who studies hair. Not hairstyles or follicles, but actual hair. "You're alive because of chemistry," he notes, and the chemical reactions in your body depend on various metals, all of which end up in your hair. "Hair is one way of looking at these metals and making sure you've got enough of them."
Beaumier, a renowned analytical chemist from Ontario, is coming to Edmonton's Telus World of Science this weekend to talk about hair and health. Beaumier is the president of the Canadian Alternative Health Laboratories, former president of the Canadian Society for Chemistry and a founder of Maxxam Analytics, Canada's largest private analytical testing laboratory.
His visit is part of a series of talks celebrating the International Year of Chemistry, says Frank Florian, science director at the Telus World of Science. "The human body is basically one big chemical factory," he notes, and your hair is a permanent record of its activities. "It's a way of predicting your future health."
Hair health
Beaumier says he got interested in hair science six years ago after one of his employees started studying it. His team has now analyzed thousands of hair samples from healthy, sick and dead people to find links between health and hair.
Hair is an excellent biopsy material, Florian says — everyone has it, and, unlike blood or skin, it's painless to give. Blood can tell you about a person's health today, but not last month since it changes too often. Hair is like a core sample of your body's activities — the further along the strand, the further back you go in time — which makes it perfect for tracking long-term problems such as environmental pollution.
It's also a visual indicator of overall health, notes Allana Parks, a stylist at Ricci Hair in St. Albert. Dry, damaged or brittle hair could be the result of poor nutrition, stress, surgery or nasty weather.
Beaumier's team takes half-gram samples of hair (typically 10 one-inch strands), dissolves them in acid and runs them through an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. That device blasts the hair with super-hot plasma that breaks it into its component elements, sorting those elements with a magnetic field. Detectors then determine the amount of each element in the hair and spit out the results.
That data can tell you much about a person's life. Hair samples from Iraq commonly show skewed ratios of sodium and potassium ions, Beaumier notes, suggesting chronic stress. Many also have elevated cortisol levels, suggesting an increased risk of heart attack.
It can also explain strange health problems, he continues. When they analyzed hair from a 10-year-old girl who had unexplained seizures, they found she had unusually high levels of cadmium in her body. "This stuff is absorbed through your skin," he says, and they soon figured out the culprit: costume jewellery. Another family managed to trace the high arsenic levels in their hair to the treated lumber on their deck.
His team is now studying how hair can be used to predict and prevent diseases. You can detect osteoporosis 20 to 30 years before it shows up in bone by monitoring strontium levels in hair, for example, while selenium levels could predict your chance of getting cancer. They're now running experiments with HIV-positive patients in Africa to see if selenium supplements can help them fend off AIDS.
Beaumier's talk starts at 2 p.m. this June 18 at the Telus World of Science. Call 780-451-3344 for details.
