What is Hair Analysis?

Hair analysis gives us a good guide to essential mineral status and to heavy metal toxicity in your body. In other words we can tell if you have enough of the nutrients the baby will need to build himself with and/or if you have too much of the nasty things that could be harmful to him.

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Foresight has been testing hair and giving supplement programmes to ensure successful reproduction for over 30 years.

Firstly we worked with the American laboratory MINERALAB and then we transferred the work to Surrey University and worked with them for nine years, perfecting the technique, and doing a study on Preconceptual Care which you will find on the website.

After nine years we had so many people coming to us each week we overwhelmed the capacity at the University, so with their help we set up our own laboratory.

Hair analysis gives us a good guide to essential mineral status and to heavy metal toxicity. In other words we can tell if you have enough of the nutrients the baby will need to build himself with and/or if you have too much of the nasty things that could be harmful to him. Included on this website we have some of the research papers explaining what a baby does and does not need.

Each mineral has a very specific function in making the baby. It also helps the mother maintain her own health and vitality – which is also important. ‘Post-Partum depression’ (baby blues) is really post-partum exhaustion and mainly caused by a lack of calcium, magnesium, manganese, zinc, B-complex vitamins and essential fatty acids. Once these nutrients are restored the mood passes, usually in 3-4 days.

Animals are brighter, they know by instinct to eat the placenta. The placenta contains a wealth of nutrients in particular zinc! (A typical human placenta has 360-600mg of zinc). Professor Bert Vallee found that in this way the zinc/copper balance was restored in the rats within 96 hours of birth. Just as well a rat does not have PPD as she may have 14 babies to look after!

Then we look at the metals the baby definitely does not want in any large amount – particularly aluminium, cadmium, lead and mercury. All/any of these at too high a level can damage the baby’s brain and central nervous system and/or cause skeletal deformity. We tackle these by sorting out the environment and by giving cleansing nutrients which encourage the body to throw them out. Copper is an essential element but on occasion it can go too high due mainly to copper water pipes giving off copper into the tap water. This too will need rectifying before the pregnancy.

View information on environmental contamination by heavy metals »

View information on trace elements & »

What do we do with your hair?

If you ever contact the Foresight Laboratory you may hear references to washing, cooking and analysing your hair sample. You might like to know more details of this process, so here are a few notes about how we treat your sample.

Sampling

We rely on you to give us a good sample - ideally two tablespoonfuls of hair, one inch (2.5cm) long taken from the nape of the neck, or approximately the size and thickness of a females little finger. Too short and it floats away during washing; too long and it shows what your body has been doing over a period of months rather than weeks. If your hair is long when you cut it, please only send us the inch of new growth not the whole length as once it has been tossed about in an envelope it is difficult for us to determine which is the cut end. Please do not send shavings of hair as they are not long enough. Put the hair sample in a paper envelope, with no sellotape, cling film, or other packaging.

Washing

We do not use detergent to wash your hair, we use acetone and water. Acetone is used in nail varnish remover and is very good at removing grease. After washing with acetone we wash the sample with three lots of water (double distilled and deionised laboratory water, not tap water) and then another lot of acetone to remove all contaminants. This is a method used in many laboratories. We dry the samples at 55°C overnight.

Cooking

The proper jargon term is digestion, which means extracting the things we want to analyse from the sample matrix. We put 200 milligrams (about a teaspoonful) of hair into a Teflon container and add concentrated nitric acid and laboratory water. Then we put on a tight-fitting lid, clip twelve samples into a turntable and place them in a microwave oven. In effect the samples are cooked in miniature pressure cookers. The microwave oven monitors the temperature and pressure within the containers, heating them to 200°C and 450 psi. After this treatment, the original sample of hair has become a pale yellow solution, with the organic matter destroyed and the inorganic metals dissolved. We dilute this strongly acid solution to 50 ml with laboratory water ready for analysis.

Analysis

From your school science lessons you may remember doing experiments with test-tubes and Bunsen burners, making pretty colours, awful smells and loud bangs. You may also remember about atoms, and that different elements have atoms of particular masses. Our analytical method weighs atoms. The technique is called Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The sample solution is sprayed into a stream of argon (an inert gas present in the air) which is at 6000°C. The atoms get very excited and become electrically charged. The charged atoms pass into a vacuum chamber through a series of small holes, and are focused by charged plates and rods, similar to electrons in a television screen. The atoms move in a way that depend on their mass and charge, so the machine can separate and detect each mass in turn. By comparing the response from the sample with that from a solution containing known amounts of each metal the amount in the sample can be measured. If this seems to you a complicated affair, you are right. But it has to be so to give us the extremely low detection limits that are needed. We want to tell reliably the difference between one and two ten-thousandths of a percent of lead in your hair.

Quality of Results

Working at such low levels we put a lot of effort into ensuring that the data we produce are reliable. We do this in several ways. All our equipment is serviced by the manufacturer, and before it is used we make sure that it is performing to their specification. Every day we check that the microwave oven is digesting the samples properly. We put in a sample of hair with a known result, this is called a Certified Reference Material (CRM); and a sample of just acid and water as a "procedural blank". For every twenty samples we analyse a solution bought from an independent supplier, certified by them to contain a known amount of each metal. This is to check that the instrument is calibrated properly, and is performing correctly for the last sample as well as the first. We repeat analysis for samples that are low or high compared with the normal range.

Interpretation of data

Once we are happy with the results they are transferred to the Foresight HQ for interpretation, then sent to you with recommendations.

Turnaround Times

The laboratory can handle up to two-hundred and fifty samples per week, with results produced and ready to return to headquarters for interpretation within seven working days of receipt at the laboratory.

Other Samples

If a client has high concentrations of, say, lead or copper in their hair sample, we can do water or dust analyses to try and find if there is an obvious source in their environment.

Conclusion

I hope that this gives you some idea about how the Foresight laboratory goes about its work albeit a short simplified overview of a complex process. It is an essential part of the Foresight philosophy that recommendations to clients are based on solid scientific evidence, and it is our mission to give high quality data fit for this purpose.