Spokey
Member
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2014
- Messages
- 321
"IFLS, as long as it's very polemic and not really science so I can shout down people with doubts about the supplied evidence." Isn't as catchy I suppose.
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Jib said:I
And is it similar to drinking in that it can have benefits as long as it's kept in moderation? And is this really such an extreme position to take based on the actual information we have about the health effects of smoking, or is the only reason it seems extreme because of very strong and deeply ingrained emotional/cultural biases against smoking?
RichardWhite said:Nicotine has powerful effects on concentration and cognitive ability, so much so that smokers are not only able to perform better after a smoke, but better than non-smokers overall (individual exceptions occur, no doubt). The downside is when they are smokers but are deprived of a smoke, their cognitive ability becomes worse than a non-smoker.
RichardWhite said:Secondly, whilst there are chemical additives, they make up a minute amount of the cigarette: most artificial chemicals and additives constitute 0.0001% of the cigarette. Given the size and weight of a cigarette, it is very obvious that 0.0001% amounts to practically nothing. To give a more accurate example, in the brand Marlboro Red there are 0.035 milligrams of flavourings – both natural and artificial – per cigarette. Smoking twenty cigarettes a day still only produces 0.7 mg, not even one thousandth of a gram. To put this into context, the Queen’s nose on a British coin weighs a gram, yet it is over a thousand times more than the natural and artificial flavourings present in a cigarette.
RichardWhite said:Furthermore, there is not a single ingredient in tobacco products that is not approved for use, nor is there a single chemical or additive that we do not get from other sources including food and water. Ammonia, for example, is present in fertilisers
RichardWhite said:"A cigarette, on average, delivers 20-90 micrograms in mainstream smoke and up to 700 micrograms in side stream smoke. However, space heaters and gas ranges release 20,000–40,000 micrograms per hour. Formaldehyde is also used extensively in wood finish, glue, fabric coating, insulation, and many other places. In mobile homes, concentrations have been measured in excess of 5,000 micrograms per cubic metre."
RichardWhite said:The main 'evil' we are told about smoking is that it causes lung cancer. Yet only around 10-15% of smokers contract lung cancer. Nowadays, with fewer smokers than before, non-smokers are contracting the disease more than smokers are - for decades the mantra of preventing and curing lung cancer is to stop smoking, and now swathes of people have been let down by the medical establishment because they've got a deadly disease and no idea how it happened.
RichardWhite said:I think that CO is more of a theoretical harm from smoking - by which I mean, we know that CO can be lethal, and we know it's in cigarette smoke, ergo we can suffer ill effects from CO as a result of smoking. But I've not seen anything credible to support this. Given people have been known to smoke 100 cigarettes a day and not suffer anything close to carbon monoxide poisoning, I do wonder whether there's cause for concern for someone smoking 10 a day.
RichardWhite said:This is where anti-smokers want it all their own way - smoking is bad because of the heat and smoke, apparently. Yet chewing tobacco is also dangerous...
Personally, I don't know, I've not studied chewing tobacco. I know to be sceptical though, because we live in a time where smoking and anything that looks like smoking is to be banned. For many of the people behind that agenda, it's better to demonise the entire plant.
RichardWhite said:I dedicated an entire chapter to the low birth weight argument. My conclusion was simply this: "It is a commonly held view that pregnant women should not smoke because smoking is a cause of low birth weight. Once again, though, this is based on statistics and the idea that correlation means causation. As has already been established, the majority of smokers are from the lower social classes and those groups of people tend to be unhealthy, largely as a result of eating food of poor nutritional value. It is also an established fact that poor nutrition can lead to underweight babies." ...
I thought damage to and reduced blood flow through small blood vessels was one of the mechanisms of harm from smoking. Why was it so obvious to Naeye a few decades ago that it wouldn't increase the risk of difficulties in blood flow across the placenta?RichardWhite said:Whilst on the topic of smoking and pregnancy, the final word should come from Dr Richard L. Naeye, a leading obstetrical researcher who studied more than 58,000 pregnancies:
We recently found no significant association between maternal smoking and either stillbirths or neonatal deaths when information about the underlying disorders, obtained from placental examinations, was incorporated into the analyses. Similar analyses found no correlation between maternal smoking and preterm birth. The most frequent initiating causes of preterm birth, stillbirth, and neonatal death are acute chorioamnionitis, disorders that produce chronic low blood flow from the uterus to the placenta, and major congenital malformations. There is no credible evidence that cigarette smoking has a role in the genesis of any of these disorders.
RichardWhite said:You mentioned going out before the smoking ban and being around smokers. We've all been there so we can relate to this. Did you ever see anyone die as a result of it? I never did. If you sat in a garage with a car running and the door shut you wouldn't take too long to die, yet hundreds of smokers can sit in an unventilated pub and remain alive. Maybe it stands to reason then that we're having more CO exposure by walking alongside a road than from tobacco? (Did you ever notice that a baby's pushchair puts their face almost perfectly level with exhaust pipes?)
RichardWhite said:There's also glutathione, the body's metal detoxifier and antioxidant. A study found that cigarette smokers had 80% higher levels than non-smokers.
"It is also known that smoking doubles the levels of the vital detox enzyme catalyse which neutralises alcohol, cyanide, formaldehyde and toxic metals. The study examined the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalyse (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GSHPx), in alveolar macrophages (AM) from cigarette smokers and from smoke-exposed hamsters. They found that 'the activities of SOD and CAT from AM of smokers and smoke-exposed hamsters were twice that found in control subjects (p less than 0.01).'"
Agree that not all problems can be solved by nutrition. Where the limits to this might lie is not well tested, given the generally poor quality of widely available food and nutritional advice. I am not convinced that net benefits of regular smoking have been demonstrated; it still seems to me that for most people regular smoking would be a net negative.RichardWhite said:The point here is that net positives from smoking far exceed nicotine improving concentration, and the vast disproportion between smokers and non-smokers goes a long way to suggest that the gap can't be closed just by eating better.
I am quite willing to believe that there are some potential benefits for using it in particular ways for particular contexts. Doesn't mean tobacco or cigarettes are good for us all on an everyday basis. Lots of plants have useful medicinal properties that don't mean everyone would benefit from using them all the time. Lots of medicines have net benefit only in a limited range of conditions. Things that have traditionally been revered are often not traditionally considered suitable for everyday use.RichardWhite said:Tobacco has been revered as a medical plant for millennia - maybe there's good reason for that.
Ben said:Smoking is unhealthy, period. Good response Tara, some people need to stop ignoring the facts and accept the truth sometimes.
Such_Saturation said:We need to address the growing menace of fourth and fifth hand smoke.
http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.it/2010 ... -hand.html
https://steveshark.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... cco-smoke/
barbwirehouse said:The link between smoking tobacco and health problems is 100% supported by science.
jyb said:barbwirehouse said:The link between smoking tobacco and health problems is 100% supported by science.
The link between pufa and good health is 100% supported by science.
In old people, a little nicotine can have a balancing effect, improving alertness, and probably protecting nerves, for example in the negative association with Parkinson's disease. But in younger people, its vasoconstrictive effect tends to promote the development of wrinkles in the skin, and I think it's likely to contribute to periodontal disease.
[NIACINAMIDE FOR STOPPING SMOKING] After middle age, nicotine isn't likely to become addictive, and in small amounts it has nerve protective effects. Some of those effects probably overlap with the nerve protective effects of niacinamide. I haven't experimented with nicotine or tobacco, but I think transdermal application is preferable to smoking; carbon monoxide and other serious toxins are produced by burning the tobacco.
magCarlsen said:Smoking is well-established and scientifically supported to be harmful but I can't see, say, a cigarette once a month causing much harm at all.
jyb said:magCarlsen said:Smoking is well-established and scientifically supported to be harmful but I can't see, say, a cigarette once a month causing much harm at all.
You just contradicted yourself with the quote from Peat mentioning some positive effects of nicotine. These beneficial effect of nicotine are very mainstream research. So, what do you mean by "well established"? I believe you are not informed on nicotine nor smoking. It's like people saying fish oil is great because there is a lot of good research on omega-3 without being aware of the debate.
carbon monoxide and other serious toxins are produced by burning the tobacco
All smoke is carcinogenic. It's true that nicotine can be protective in some situations, and usually that's in older people. In those situations, it's best to use it orally or transdermally.
Thousands of different chemicals in cigarette smoke, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (such as benzopyrene), formaldehyde, cadmium, nickel, arsenic, tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), phenols, and many others contribute to the harmful effects of smoking.