[wincy]

Smoking cigarettes didn’t really matter for as long as we were regularly burning wood for fuel. Turns out just burning pretty much anything and breathing in the particles is really bad for you. Makes sense we didn’t realize it was bad until we stopped burning logs and coal for home heating and cooking.

[sarchertech]

Cigarettes actually are uniquely bad when it comes to lung cancer. Lung cancer was very rare in 1900 and before when everyone was still burning wood or coal for warmth and cooking. Lung cancer rates didn’t take off until cigarette popularity exploded after WWI.

Chewing tobacco also causes mouth cancer, so there’s more to it than just inhaling byproducts of combustion.

[red-iron-pine]

1) people smoked a lot more in the post WWI econ boom

2) additives or even just paper compound the negative effects of the smoke on the lungs.

like, firefighters - who usually have physical fitness requirements and don't smoke - see rates of lung cancer similar to moderate smokers, simply due to the higher volume of particulate and chems hitting their lungs.

it is dose-dependant, and firefighers who see more fires see more cancer. occasional tobacco pipe smokers in 1850 saw less lung cancer than 2-pack-a-day post-WW2 smokers.

[sarchertech]

I’m unsure where your firefighters have the same lung cancer risk as moderate smokers information comes from, but it’s wrong.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7063017/

Here’s an meta-analysis of 49 studies that shows no increase in lung cancer.

And of course it’s dose dependent. But newer studies show that years smoking is much more important than intensity when it comes to lung cancer risk. So smoking half a pack a day for 20 years is worse than a pack a day for 10 years.

Dry snuff comes with a 2-8x increase in oral cancer and a 10-12x increase in nasal and sinus cancer.

Tobacco is a carcinogen—even without additives. In addition to epidemiological evidence we have a plausible mechanism of action.

Alkaloids in the leaf convert into carcinogenic TSNAs during curing, aging, or drying. Tobacco plants absorbs heavy metals. And tobacco plants absorb polonium-210.

There’s a lot of misinformation and misleading interpretations out there that come from years of the tobacco industry attempting to create uncertainty. Especially with your firefighter myth, I think you might have got hold of some of it.

[krsw]

From what I remember reading chewing tobacco is orders of magnitude less cancer causing than smoking. So much so, that some groups see it as harmful to lump it in with smoking or vaping. If you really need some nic, popping a zyn is probably the least harmful way to get it.

[djhn]

Do these… ”groups”, which would rather you not lump chewing tobacco together with other tobacco products… manufacture and sell chewing tobacco?

[mrguyorama]

Also scientists were recognizing the link decades before governments finally caved and regulated the industry and decades more before those industries were significantly curtailed by limiting advertising.

Then they bought a new brand name and started running the same playbook.

[irishcoffee]

I didn't mention smoking cigarettes at all. I said people literally blew smoke up their ass. Huh, I wonder if that's where the saying came from, now that I think about it.