how bad is natural tobacco for you really? nobody used to get lung cancer from smoking.
I noticed that too. Smoking was common among hunter-gatherer societies, yet not a single case of cancer was found among them until they started becoming modernized. That's not to say that smoking is healthy, but it does suggest that it was much less of a health hazard in the past for whatever reasons.
On 10/07/11 6:59 PM, Ray Audette wrote [at the Paleofood forum]:
> that claim [that humans didn't get cancer in hunter-gatherer days] was first made by Stanislaw Tanchou in 1843 in his regular lecture at The University of Paris Medical School. He found that the most accurate way to predict epidemiological cancer rates was by examining per-capital grain consumption rates. These proved to have a striking correlation in all areas where these data were gathered. He thus predicted that no cancer would be found in people who didn't eat grain. Until the prevalence of Acrylamides in human blood samples was discovered in 2001, scientists had no idea why [the] correlation was so.
>
> Many explorers and missionaries, inspired by Tanchou, began to search for cancer among hunter-gathers. In the resulting 100 year search for cancer in such people, documented by Anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson [Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, Cancer: Disease of Civilization. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960], none was ever found except among those ... eating missionary food.
One of the more revealing, but not that surprising, additives to cigarrettes is high fructose corn syrup.
In addition to no additives in their tobacco, traditional peoples smoked pipes instead of cigs. Even today, pipe-smoking has much lower rates of cancer than cig smoking. Mouth cancer is still a significant risk with modern pipe smoking, but lung cancer is much less common than with cig smoking, reportedly because the smoke is not inhaled deeply into the lungs, which is not a traditional practice. Filters on cigarettes encourage even deeper inhalation than standard cigs. Filtered cigs, one of the newest tobacco vehicles, is also one of the most carcinogenic.
Wow, what's the reason for adding 599 (!!) things to something small like a cigarette?
Same reason as everything else: $$$
