Cannibalism - #9: Hair

Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.

TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE:  Cannibalism (munching) “could you eat a whole human being? (more munching) With the help of a doctor, a scientist and a chef, I set out to see if it’s possible. Cannibalism: part nine – hair”. (burp)

Whether you’re blessed with a bouffant or as bald as a coot, you won’t be shocked to hear that hair isn’t the kind of tasty treat that even the most famished cannibal would consider chowing down on.

2016, Blake Leibel, the director of a horror film unironically called Bald, beat and tortured his girlfriend, Iana Kasian over six hours, drained her body of blood, dismembered her, scattered her limbs, and with a razor blade, he scalped the long dark hair from her head as well as half of her face and her right ear.

Scalping, like skinning has been symbolic of domination as far back as 5000 years BC. For the Ancient Greeks, hair had long signified a person’s status, rank or tribe, as well as breeding, wealth and brains. But as wars ravaged the world, seeking to humiliate our foes, whereas once body parts like the heads were taken to be paraded as war trophies, the skulls were scalped solely to make them easier to carry.

For a cannibal, the scalp is nothing but a souvenir or a byproduct, as even when they are tucking into a face, a bicep or a thigh, the last thing they want to be munching on is a mouthful of hair. Therefore, you won’t be surprised to hear that we have no dietary guidelines by the NHS on hair consumption, nor any data on its calorific value by paleolithic era cannibals, as rightly, when it’s on meat, they would either skin it or burn it off.

Hair is a remnant of our long-forgotten past, when as hunter gatherers, our fur kept us warm.

Made of layers of a hardened protein called keratin, most people should have 100-150,000 Terminal hairs on their head and 5 million shorter Vellus hairs over their body, with each follicle able to last up to 7 years as they have their own muscle, nerve and blood supply. And although hair seems to continue growing, once the follicle is visible, it is dead, along with our nails, most of our skin cells and parts of our teeth.

Canadian serial-killer Bruce McArthur kept photographs of his victim’s deaths and how he humiliated their corpses. In a motive known only to him, he posed their bodies wearing a fur coat, a black leather hat, smoking a cigar, and symbolically he shaved their heads and beards, keeping the hair in Ziploc bags. Oddly, although he wasn’t a cannibal, it was actually an alarming post by a fantasist going under the alias of Chefmate50 on the cannibal fantasy forum Zambian Meat which led to McArthur’s arrest.

So, why don’t we eat hair? We don’t because we can’t digest it. Even in our stomachs which contain 1 ½ litres of gastric juice with a pH level of 1.5 and made of a lethal mix of hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride and sodium chloride - so powerful it can dissolve most metals - it can’t dissolve keratin. And with our acid averaging 98.6 Fahrenheit (37 Celsius), Keratin doesn’t break down until 230C (450F).

If we swallow an occasional hair, it wouldn’t do us any harm, as it will pass harmlessly out of the gut, But anything more can cause Trichobezoars (also known as hairballs) which can become lodged in the gastrointestinal tract resulting in vomiting, anemia, obstruction, bowel perforation and even death.

As scavengers covered in fur, cats and dogs have evolved to cope with hair balls, and with the pH level of their stomach swinging from 7.3 (neutral) to 1.5 (similar to battery acid), although still toxic, they can cope, whereas – being almost hairless humans - coughing up hair balls is a skill we have lost.

That said, hair is also a haven for bacteria, fungi and yeast, as well as a wealth of hazardous chemicals that many of our scalps are subjected to, such as peroxide, sulphates, parabens and formaldehyde.

So, it seems that unless a serial killer with cannibal tendencies has developed the skill to hack up a fur ball, it’s unlikely they’ll have a penchant for eating human hair. Most victim’s hair is scalped, binned or kept as a souvenir, but given that its DNA can last for centuries (in the right conditions), if cooked at above 230C in an oven, hair becomes as brittle as a powder, and most of its DNA will be destroyed.

Hair can be deadly, but without you knowing it, you may be ingesting hair daily. L-Cysteine is an amino acid used in the mass production of bread. Often made from duck feathers to give your loaf a soft and bouncy texture for longer, according to the Health Freedom Alliance, having first been dissolved in acid, “most of it is extracted from a cheap and abundant natural protein source - human hair”. So, think about that the next time you tuck into a sliced white, a pizza, a tortilla, and even (gulp) a cake.

Join me tomorrow for the vampire’s source of energy – blood.