I wonder if there is just about anything (other than water) that you can put in your body that wouldn't have some effect on the mutation rate of some particular cells in your body.
Of course, that seems to be exactly what is going on:
>"These considerations of mechanism suggest that at chronic doses close to the toxic dose, any chemical, whether synthetic or natural, and whether genotoxic or nongenotoxic, is a likely rodent and human carcinogen. Not all chemicals would be expected to be carcinogens at high doses; the MTD may not be reached (101) or the chemical may be toxic without causing cell killing or mitogenesis."
I wonder if that's due to the other stuff typically added to chewing tobacco.
It'd be interesting if tobacco could be safer, but isn't, because the manufacturers don't want to incur the expense and anti-tobacco folks want to keep people from smoking at all, not make it safer (c.f. vaping, which is — I think — basically harmless and yet is banned as much as smoking is).
> The most harmful cancer-causing substances in smokeless tobacco are tobacco-specific nitrosamines.
> Cancers linked to the use of smokeless tobacco include:
* Mouth, tongue, cheek, and gum cancer
* Cancer in the esophagus
* Pancreatic cancer
You can also get other kinds of mouth and tooth problems, and of course nicotine is still a definite health risk.
If there were a way to make tobacco healthy, I think the manufacturers would have spared no expense to do so, because the death of a customer prevents them from spending more money on what is sold.
It's based on roasting/burning it, the same reason why meat is cancer-causing. That's also why Swedish snus probably isn't cancer causing, because instead of being roasted, the tobacco is steam pasteurized.
I can't imagine that cigarettes would work with steamed leaves.
edit: And you'd have to vape the steamed leaf cigarettes, of course.
You get DNA damage from a lot of different sources, from food to viruses to radiation to industrial chemicals to just plain replication errors.
I agree vegans probably still get cell damage from the food they eat, but that's not proof positive because they would still die from cancer even if they didn't.
>"These considerations of mechanism suggest that at chronic doses close to the toxic dose, any chemical, whether synthetic or natural, and whether genotoxic or nongenotoxic, is a likely rodent and human carcinogen. Not all chemicals would be expected to be carcinogens at high doses; the MTD may not be reached (101) or the chemical may be toxic without causing cell killing or mitogenesis."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/