Booby Trap: The Truth about Breast-Enhancing Products

By:
Abbey Goodman

For all the effectiveness of the many breast-enhancing creams and pills on the market, you may as well save your money and devote a couple of hours to a rigorous "we must, we must, we must increase our bust" session instead.

And that's the good news about them.

Many women who want bigger, fuller, firmer boobs are taken in by claims of increasing bustlines the "natural way" without the risk of surgery. Because many of the breast-enhancing products claim to be "all natural" and come "straight from Mother Nature," it's easy to think that there's no harm in trying them. Well, think again.

According to Dr. Eden Fromberg, a holistic gynecologist and osteopath in New York City, "If something really does stimulate the breast tissue, it's not healthy unless they're [naturally] being stimulated by the milk hormone."

A perfect body in a bottle?

While it's tempting to think that we can get a perfect body from a bottle, many women don't realize that by popping pills and slathering on lotions they are subjecting themselves to nothing more than a placebo at best and something potentially dangerous at worst.

The most common ingredients in breast-firming and -enhancing products are wild yam, black cohosh, blessed thistle, damiana, dandelion root, dong quai, fennel, kava kava, saw palmetto and watercress. We ran this list by Dr. Fromberg. Her reaction:

Blessed thistle is an anti-vomiting agent. Kava kava is considered a sedative and a hypnotic that, in sleeping pill form, gave Dr. Fromberg hallucinations. ("Maybe you could hallucinate bigger breasts," she quipped.) Dandelion is a blood and liver tonic as well as a diuretic. A diuretic helps the body to flush water, which would only decrease breast size, Dr. Fromberg pointed out.

Dr. Fromberg said that the only one that has any chance of affecting breast tissue growth is wild yam. "It does have an estrogenic effect on breast tissue," she explained, "but, of course, this may increase the risk of breast cancer." And that's not the kind of growth that any woman would want.

Buyer beware

So how can these products claim to promote breast fullness, firmness and increased size?

Breast-enhancing products are sold in the U.S. as dietary supplements, a broad category of substances that includes herbs, vitamins, minerals and other ingredients. Dietary supplements are not regulated by the U.S. government as closely as over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription medications are. There's little or no guarantee that they're safe, that they contain what they say they do or that they work as advertised.

In fact, the way the law works now, unlike prescription and OTC medications, dietary supplements don't have to pass rigorous testing for safety and efficacy by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before being sold on the market. If a dietary supplement is later proven to be ineffective, it must be removed. However, this sort of "retro-testing" is something to which the government allocates very few resources. Plus, new products come on the market all the time, making it difficult to stay on top of everything.

In addition, tests of herbal supplements have found differences between what's listed on the label and what's inside the bottle. That means you may be taking more ‑- or less, or none at all ‑- of the ingredients. And some supplements are contaminated with metals, unlabeled prescription drugs, pesticides or other harmful substances.

However, despite these risks, some women continue to take them.

"[The products are] responding to people's hopes and dreams," said Dr. Richard Greco, a plastic surgeon in Savannah, Georgia, and spokesman for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' public education committee, who has researched the effectiveness of nonsurgical breast augmentation procedures. "If someone told you that if I put a blue light over your head and spun it for a half hour, your breasts will get larger, a certain number of people will believe it and buy it just because they want it to work."

Moo-ving up a size?

So is there anything short of plastic surgery that will help women get larger breasts? Both Dr. Greco and Dr. Fromberg did agree that a product called Brava might do the trick.

"[Brava are] cups that you put on your breasts that maybe they use on cows to milk them," Dr. Fromberg explained. "You have to lie there with them on your breasts, and it suctions more fluid into them so that in the morning they are all swollen from this sucking on them all night."

And if you don't want to live like a lactating bovine? (After all, it's not quite the sexy look you were going for.) There's always retaining water, gaining weight, push-up bras and the old, tried-and-true, "chicken cutlet" rubber bra inserts. They might not be the miracle you were looking for, but the only side effect you have to worry about is your man mistaking them for dinner.

Then again, you could always try just liking yourself the way you are. But that may be a little more "natural" than some women want.