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by ParallelThread 888 days ago
I am using nicotine gum to quit smoking, using about 5 4mg gums/day. I have substituted one addiction for another. I am also worried that these gums are not benign and whether there is a higher risk of cancer from using them. Someone told me to instead use Zyn - thankfully I stayed away from that.
4 comments
jessriedel 888 days ago
Nicotine is vastly safer than tobacco. You've substituted an addiction that unambiguously kills millions of people to one that, if it is harmful, is sufficiently less so that we haven't managed to measure the effect clearly.

By all means, if you dislike being addicted to something because it interferes with life, because it's expensive, or because you're worried it will eventually be found to have modest health harms, then quit. But moving from smoking to gum gets you 90% of the benefits.

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nick__m 888 days ago
The cancer risk from chewing tobacco is mostly caused by the abrasive damage it does to the oral mucosal soft-tissue¹. If someone chewed maples leaf with the same vigor as someone who chewed tobacco it would probably cause oral cancer to.

The nicotine itself doesn't appear to be a carcinogen² so unless your chewing gum is abrasive, I would be surprised if it caused cancer, but the scientific literature on oral cancer and nicotine chewing gum is almost inexistent so my opinion is mostly based on a feeling.

1- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172921/ 2- https://cancer-code-europe.iarc.fr/index.php/en/ecac-12-ways...

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hammock 888 days ago
I know a guy who works for a gun manufacturer and he says the synthetic gum base is made on the same line that car tire rubber is made on (they clean it between runs of course).

Zyns are pretty clean as far as ingredients go but it is a plastic pouch, and they do contain artificial sweeteners.

I found NicNac Naturals (nicnac.com) which is sold out of the UK and it’s a fully dissolving mint, no plastic or non-natural ingredients involved

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torstenvl 888 days ago
Zyn is probably safer than nicotine gum. Gum often contains heavy metals like cadmium and lead.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9985244/

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