Some things I can't Figure Out

[Doc]

Most of the focus on cancer and smokeless tobacco seems to be on TSNA's
Tobacco Specific Nitrosamines. It is my understanding that the levels were in the 300'ish ppm range for American Snuff but but that the levels now are hovering around 10 ppm depending on brand. Snus has been in the 1-2 ppm (parts per million) for a while now. Regular chewing tobacco: Redman, Levi Garrett, etc. has always been around 5-10 ppm. So here is where I am confused:

Is modern American smokefree tobacco 1/100th less carcenogenic than before and are we working with old information when we talk about it's dangers?

If regular chewing tobacco has always been low, why the horror stories about baseball players getting their faces slowly eaten away by cancer?

Is there any really modern research on American smokeless tobacco:Scoal, Kodiak etc. as well as chewing tobacco?

My opinion at this point:
The TSNA's are really pretty low in American Wet Snuff but it would take a few decades to get good data if anyone is really looking. I don't think they really are because they would rather use the older, and scarier numbers. Tobacco companies have realized that dead people don't buy their stuff and that have largely coppied the Sweedish methods. I am still concerned that they are using ingredients that I wouldn't want to put in my mouth. I wish they would just take the initiative and start publishing their ingredients.
The tobacco companies cannot talk openly about how much safer their product is now because that would open them up to all kinds of liability. For the most part they would rather people smoke, it just is more profitable.
This snus in America thing (Camel Snus, etc) is going to be interesting to watch. The evidence sugests that snus has a reverse "gateway drug" effect. That is: People who try snus tend to then start smoking at far lower levels than the number of people that start snusing and reduce or quit smoking. This puts big tobacco in a bit of a bind. Do you really want to promote a product that lowers your overall profitability?
It looks like they tried to use so little nicotine as to limit this effect but they are educating consumers to the product and will need to eventually compete with the real stuff.
General Cigar (I Believe) is backing the GetSnus.com movement. If that takes off big tobacco will be force to compete. Oddly enough, big tobacco might want to lobby FOR the interstate ban on tobacco sales to limit such threats.
Food for thought.

[Jason]

I think those older figures are what a lot of the antis are relying on for their scare tactics. TSNA's in smokeless tobacco products are steadily dropping, as shown in several third-party studies (a couple of which have been posted, but I can't remember exactly where).

As far as the horror stories and gruesome pictures: sure, there is a possibility of mouth cancer, but I don't see how these people get away with telling people that it is an inevitability. Take this site, for example...

http://whyquit.com/

I found it back when I was looking to quit smoking. Check out the smokeless tobacco section.....There is actually a lot of good information on there regarding cigarettes, but it surprises me that with all of that info, they pretty much threw together a blurb on smokeless, included a couple stories of people who got mouth cancer from it, and left it at that. I think it's horrible what happened to those people, but it seems to me that those stories were thrown in as an afterthought.

I'm from the south originally; I know almost as many people who dip as people who smoke. In all the time I've known these people, as well as their relatives and friends, I've never seen one of them get mouth, neck, or throat cancer. BUT, I've seen more than a few get lung cancer from smoking....

Can smokeless tobacco cause cancer? Sure. But I don't think it's anywhere near as common as these people would like us to believe. :evil:

[Sal1000us]

Doc, based on couple of studies I read snus contains much less TSNA compared to American brands
----------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus

Health consequences
Since snus is not intended nor recommended for inhalation, it does not affect the lungs as cigarettes do, although it does contain more nicotine than cigarettes. Because it is steam-cured, rather than fire-cured like smoking tobacco or other chewing tobacco, it contains lower concentrations of nitrosamines and other carcinogens that form from the partially anaerobic heating of proteins; 2.8 parts per mil for Ettan brand compared to as high as 127.9 parts per mil in American brands, according to a study by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Health. The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges that Swedish men have the lowest rate of lung cancer in Europe, partly due to the low tobacco smoking rate, but does not argue for substituting snus for smoking, citing that the effects of snus still remain unclear. Around 2005 several reports pointed to the fact that no carcinogenic effects could be attributed to Nordic snus and this resulted in the warning label that snus could cause cancer could be removed. It was replaced with the more neutral label "Can affect your health negatively". Research is still going on but at the moment no conclusive reports have been made regarding the health effects of snus.

The European Union banned the sale of snus in 1992, after a 1985 WHO study concluded that "oral use of snuffs of the types used in North America and western Europe is carcinogenic to humans", but a WHO committee on tobacco has also acknowledged that evidence is inconclusive regarding health consequences for snus consumers. Only Sweden and EFTA-member Norway are exempt from this ban. A popular movement during the run-up to the 1994 referendum for Sweden's EU membership made exemption from the EU criminalization of snus a condition of the membership treaty. This may be due to taxation reasons.

Recent actions by many European governments to limit the use of cigarettes has led to calls to lift the ban on snus, as it is generally considered to be less harmful than cigarette smoke, both to the user and to others.


Debate among public health researchers
There is some debate among public health researchers over the use of "safer" tobacco or nicotine delivery systems, generally dividing along two lines of thought. Most researchers are currently of the "abstinence" belief, believing that no form of tobacco or nicotine use is acceptable or safe, and should be minimized among the population. A minority (primarily in the European Union and Canada) believes in "harm reduction," where the belief is generally that, while it should remain a goal to reduce addiction to nicotine in the population as a whole, the reduction of harm to the health of those who choose to use nicotine should override the need to reduce overall nicotine addiction. For example, some research[2] available today shows that snus use reduces or eliminates the risk of cancers that afflict other users of tobacco products such as "chewing tobacco" (the type primarily used in the United States and Canada, created in a process similar to cigarette tobacco) and cigarettes. It is hypothesized that the widespread use of snus by Swedish men (estimated at 30% of Swedish male ex-smokers), displacing tobacco smoking and other varieties of snuff, is responsible for the incidence of tobacco-related mortality in men being significantly lower in Sweden than any other European country; in contrast, since women traditionally are less likely to use snus, their rate of tobacco-related deaths in Sweden can be compared to that of other European countries.

Snus may be less harmful than other tobacco products; according to Kenneth Warner, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network,

"The Swedish government has studied this stuff to death, and to date, there is no compelling evidence that it has any adverse health consequences. ... Whatever they eventually find out, it is dramatically less dangerous than smoking."
Ongoing discussion and debates among primary scientific researchers of the effects of snus use on life expectancy appears to indicate that there is a significant increase in life expectancy among persons who previously smoked tobacco and switch to Swedish snus, depending on the age of the persons who switch, even when it is assumed that 100% of the risk of cardiovascular diseases among smokers transfers to snus users. It is also noted, in the correspondence seen in the previous citationthat concerns about the effect of marketing by the tobacco industry, as influenced by the results of these scientific studies, is of primary concern to many researchers in the field, including the risk of emboldening the industry to attempt to increase snus sales among young people and promote dual-use of snus and smoked tobacco, and that the use of medical nicotine, rather than snus, can better target at-risk populations, given better access and pricing.

Opponents of snus sales maintain that, nevertheless, even the low nitrosamine levels in snus cannot be completely risk free, but snus proponents point out that inasmuch as snus is used as a substitute for smoking or a means to quit smoking, the net overall effect is positive, similar to the effect of nicotine patches, for instance.[citation needed]

In addition, rather obviously, this eliminates any exposure to second-hand smoke, further reducing possible harm to other non-tobacco users. This is seen by public health advocates who believe in "harm reduction" as a reason for recommending snus in addition to other nicotine replacement therapies rather than continued use of cancer-causing nicotine delivery systems.

This does not, however, eliminate any harm to health caused by the nicotine itself. Current research focuses on possible long-term effects on blood pressure, hypertension and possible risk of pancreatic cancer due to tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs). TSNAs are the only component of tobacco shown to induce pancreatic cancer in laboratory animals (Rivenson et al. 1988)[7]. Nicotine may also exacerbate pancreatic illness, because nicotine stimulates the gastrointestinal tract's production of cholecystokinin, which stimulates pancreatic growth and may be implicated in pancreatic cancer. Thus far the evidence specifically implicating snus in pancreatic cancer is only suggestive. It should also be noted that the probability of developing pancreatic cancer from cigarettes is higher than the suggested chance of developing pancreatic cancer from snus.

The effects of Swedish snus on blood pressure has been studied at Umeå University in a randomly selected population sample of 4,305 Swedish men between 25 and 74 years of age. In the study, published in November 2008, the researchers found no elevation of blood pressure in snus users who had never been smokers compared to non tobacco users. In fact, snus users had lower systolic blood pressure than non tobacco users in the unadjusted data.

[MN_Snuser]

Re: Some things I can't Figure Out

Is modern American smokefree tobacco 1/100th less carcenogenic than before and are we working with old information when we talk about it's dangers?

Doc, the following link contains the most recent levels of TSNA in American moist snuff that I have found so far. The TSNA levels in American moist snuff have dropped quite a bit.

See page 86 of the study I have linked below

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1041204/Na...oSOS029Program