Misc What makes tobacco harmful?

[Pickledlemons]

So I remember reading ~10ish years ago that what makes smoking cigarettes so bad was just the fact that is was combusting plant matter and that you would get cancer just as fast from smoking an ounce of pine needles every day for 50 years. So I've kind of run with that as an my explanation.

So a couple weeks ago I was drunk on Canada day with a friend and I mentioned this - he said that cant possibly be true because other forms of tobacco cause cancer too ( chew, snuff etc). I've always known this but never made the connection. Also, 10 years ago my standard of acceptable evidence was much lower. I did a little bit of research and most of what I find strikes me as just scare tactics. ' tabacco has 5 billion chemicals in it!' Well all matter is chemicals so how is that relevant??

It seems 'natural' tabacco is harmful so I doubt its the added chemicals soley. I know its not the nicotine. Is it other naturally occurring compounds? Or is it indeed the chemicals created from combustion? ( carbon monoxide? )

No I dont smoke I just want to make sure I have accurate information.

 

[Hodor]

If you take organic matter and supply it with enough energy to break open its chemical bonds (which is exactly what happens if you burn it in order to smoke the nicotine) it will form a vast array of new compounds. Some of these, like the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are indeed quite carcinogenic.

Now, there is *some* evidence that nicotine itself may atleast act as an indirect carcinogen, but compared to coating your lungs in tar and soot, I'd say the risk of developing cancer from alternative routes of administration should be greatly reduced.

 

[purplehaze147]

The hydrocarbons produced from combustion and also fermentation are the main toxins in tobacco. It's the fermentation process that makes oral form of tobacco carcinogenic.

Fermentation allows the nicotine and flavors to be released from the plant matter much easier which is why it's done.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but non-fermented oral tobacco, which is called snus, has never been shown to cause any carcinogenic affects. Snus is definitely the least toxic form of tobacco.

 

[AlphaMethylPhenyl]

No, tobacco has TSN's in it that make it inherently carcinogenic.

From what I've read, "small" doses of nicotine prove beneficial while "large" doses pose somewhat of a toxicity. Despite what people (still) say, nicotine is nowhere near as bad for people as commercialized tobacco, barring overdose of course.

What I really want to know is how an American Spirit, Newport, and Marlboro feel like without the nicotine, but everything else exactly the same. That's an experiment. I can pretty well say that they'll still be addictive.

 

[JessFR]

Well it's no surprise you're confused. Truth is there is an enormous amount of lies and misinformation, both deliberate and from ignorance, about tobacco and nicotine. In the early days it was in attempt to make it sound safer than it was. But since people are dumb and only know how to do things in extremes, how bad it is in reality, which is already pretty bad, is still apparently not bad enough to not lie and make up shit.

Yes, everything's chemicals, and saying "it's full of chemicals" tells you one thing, that you're speaking to someone who has no idea what they're talking about and should STFU.

OK so, nicotine itself is likely not very harmful. Because of the aforementioned misinformation everywhere it's hard to know for sure, but the evidence that it's harmful in itself is weak, and I've never heard a good justification chemically to think it's particularly harmful.

Tobacco on the other hand, contains all sorts of nasty substances. This mostly applies to burned tobacco, but I'm pretty sure it's well established that other forms of use expose you to some carcinogenic substances too. It's likely less risky, but not risk free.

So that's my understanding, with the caveat that this is based on my recollection from previous research I've done on this subject.

It makes sense though, if nothing else, as I recall, tobacco by itself contains small amounts of polonium. So it's not surprising that any use of it could increase your cancer risk, even without combustion.

But you're right to be skeptical. There's no shortage of people and groups who have become fanatical and have no understanding of science and chemistry, and have already decided that anything that looks like smoking, even if chemically it's totally unrelated, has to be bad for you. And they make finding the truth much harder.

 

[Hodor]

It makes sense though, if nothing else, as I recall, tobacco by itself contains small amounts of polonium. So it's not surprising that any use of it could increase your cancer risk, even without combustion.

Pretty much any sort of plant matter contains polonium.

Polonium isn't specific to the tobacco plant. It occurs naturally mostly from the decay of radon gas, which is itself the product of the decay of various heavier radioactive elements. So if the plant is exposed to more radon - whether because of an above-average amount of radioactives occurring naturally in the soil and water where it was grown, or because the phosphates it was fertilized with were mined in an area rich in these elements - it's also going to have more polonium in it. Doesn't matter if it's tobacco, or herbs, or veggies, or weed.

However, being an alpha-emitter, your lungs are where the polonium can do the most damage (even the thin layer of dead cells on the surface of your skin offers some measure of protection against alpha radiation) and the tar likely makes it much harder to get out of there.

However, to what extent the polonium is actually contributing to the risk of developing cancer from smoking is still a matter of debate; people who get lung cancer from exposure to polonium mostly do so because they work in a mine or their house has a cellar where the air is rich in radon.

 

[Bagseed]

yeah throwing insane amounts of rock phosphate on your field will also contaminate it with radioactive heavy metals... unfortunately this also holds true for any other heavily fertilized crop.