Pipe and tobacco

[Loyalist Dave]

That was a very interesting source, thank you. :grin:

I wonder how many of those compounds are present in wood smoke, especially if some of the wood is green? I mean sure some of the chemicals are a process of the plant, nicotine being obvious in tobacco, but trees are plants and may pick up stuff from the soil, no?

:idunno:

LD

 

[Nativearizonan]

Some woodsmoke is downright poisonous, not just carcinogenic.,

 

[Black Hand]

One needs also be aware of the particulates in wood smoke. Wood smoke kills millions each year world-wide (http://www.burningissues.org/car-www/medical_effects/fact-sheet.htm), primarily in 3rd World countries that use wood, coal or dung for cooking (http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2012/not-so-improved-cookstoves).

For more, see: https://www.bing.com/search?q=deaths+from+wood+smoke&pc=MOZI&form=MOZTSB

 

[Black Hand]

Considering tobacco kills ~6 million people per year (http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm), ~2 million deaths from wood smoke is not insignificant..

 

[Billnpatti]

Wood smoke and its volatile compounds that condense out inside a flue are known to be carcinogenic. A famious study was done many years ago to discover the cause for the high rate of scrotal cancer among young chimney sweeps. Young boys, because they were small enough to fit down a chimney, were employed as chimney sweeps to go down a chimney to clean it. These boys developed a high rate of scrotal cancer. It was discovered that the cancer was due to the volatile smoke products getting into the folds of the boy's scrota. Baths not being common in those days, and especially among that class of workers, the tars, creosote, etc. as was allowed to stay in the scrotal folds and do its dirty work.

So, yes, wood smoke does contain carcinogens. I guess the take away from this is if you are around a lot of wood smoke, watch your scrotum and wash it often and well. :haha:

 

[Billnpatti]

...."Cyinide in apples, mercury in fish..."

Quite true! Apples and other fruits have cyanide in minute quantities in the seeds. Actually it is a compound called amygdalin which is metabolized into hydrogen cyanide. If one consumes only a few seeds as might happen in eating a few of these fruits, the amount of cyandide is harmless. However, I remember reading in a toxicology book about a man who enjoyed the almond-like taste of apple seeds. He saved up a bunch and ate them all at one time and, in his case, the amount of cyanide was sufficient to cause his death from cyanide poisoning.

Mercury can be concentrated in fish due to the concentration that comes as a result of the food chain. Those fish nearer the top of the food chain can have toxic levels of mercury in them if the water in which they live has mercury in it. If you are interested, google "Minamata Disease", sometimes called "Chisso-Minamata disease". Poisoning from eating fish in which mercury had been concentrated through the food chain was given this name because of a case in which the people of Minamata Japan were suffering from mercury poisoning. their diet was high in fish and it was discovered that a factory upstream from Minamata was dumping small amounts of mercury into the water that eventually ended up in the ocean at Minimata where the residents caught the fish that they ate.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Well...., even if you're not a chimney sweep....,

Just think how bad it was IF you used wood for heat, cooking, AND you also smoked a pipe!

LD

 

[tenngun]

Considering tobacco kills ~6 million people per year (http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm), ~2 million deaths from wood smoke is not insignificant..

That's not a really good stat. I see it all the time. Joe comes in with high blood pressure and s bad heart, with kidneys in the fritz. And Joe smokes. Joe dies. The doc and some of the nurses shake their heads. ' Another smoking related death' they say, and it goes in the books as tobacco related. They kinda ignore the fact that Joe was a hundred and fifty pounds over weight and that he hadn't walked farther then the kitchen or the handicapped spot to the electric scooter in the store in twenty years. Or the fact that moms and papa both died in their forties and Evan though Joe can't be called a boozer, he did drink heavier then most..
Any smoker who gets high blood pressure, high colesterol or any bad system that goes down in the books as smoking related.
I'm put in mind of st George Utah. It's a small town that has a small bump in cancer deaths over similar sized cities. This is blamed on near by nuclear test in the '50s. Maybe some of the cancers were caused by radiation exposure. However each and every cancer or health problem any one got was blamed on radiation. Even the high death rate of people in the word conquerer was blamed on radiation, none on the 1959s Hollywood life style.
So if a non smoker goes to a doc and has high blood pressure we look at your diet, history activity, if s smoker has it it's the evil weed . This applies to most conditions.

 

[Black Hand]

But smoking is/can be a significant contributing factor to a number of health problems. As can diet, exercise status, pollution, genetics and any number of others.

 

[tenngun]

That's a truism. Moderation is the key, and pipe smokers tend to be light to moderate smokers. My self I mostly smoke once a day, twice a day on two or three times a week, three times a week once every three months or less.
We will tell folks moderate drinking is good for you, beer and red wine at the top of the list. Yet we paint all smoking as bad. Lots of folks die of drinking every year.

 

[Black Hand]

As a former smoker, I'm not in any way anti-smoking. That said, there really aren't any health benefits to smoking (any amount or type) as there may be with (moderate) drinking....

 

[tenngun]

That is also true. NO ONE should take up smoking for Thier health. It has no healthy factors at all. How ever light smoking, even coffin nails has never been positively linked to any health problem.
Mind you this is said by the guy is another thread who stayed his irrational fear to eat brains, go figure.

 

[Black Hand]

I will need to disagree.
Cigarette smoke causes endothelial dysfunction - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24554606; http://www.onlinepcd.com/article/S0033-0620(03)70007-3/abstract?cc=y=, is associated with atherosclerosis - http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Cond...ssure_UCM_301886_Article.jsp#.V88fCjWYJEA)and and damage to alveoli - http://tobaccoinduceddiseases.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1617-9625-1-3-219) among a host of other issues.

 

[tenngun]

These are the stuff I hand out every day at work. However if you look at the base studies you see it's based on people smoking at least a pack a day. And ciggeretts are pumped full of a lot of nasty chemicals :td: links to less then a pack are iffy, and again the science tends to be questionable since there is no weed out of otherwise healthy people that happen to smoke vs a person with lots of other co-morbidities.
Please don't miss understand here, I'm not advocating smoking death sticks :nono: only pointing out that light smokers who are otherwise healthy, don't seem to have an increase in health risk . The fact is most people who do smoke may avoid health seeking behaviors.

 

[Elkeater]

Light smoking holds off my ulcerative colitis.

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Time for ....,

SNUFF

LD

 

[Billnpatti]

Time for ....,

SNUFF

LD

Nope, that stuff can kill ya, too. If it doesn't kill you, it will cause dental problems and can often lead to jaw cancer. Bottom line is tobacco in any form is bad for you. You can puff your way to the grave or spit your way to the grave. But, one neat thing is that you have the freedom to choose whether or not to use the stuff. 'Tain't my choice for the way to go, gasping through your COPD for your last breath or drooling down the front of your pajamas because you have no lower jaw.... but that's just silly old me, what do I know, I've fallen for the propaganda that the doctors and scientists have put out there. What do they know?

 

[Black Hand]

I've fallen for the propaganda that the doctors and scientists have put out there. What do they know?

A heck of a lot more than the great majority of the average population. The internet has become the domain of the science-deniers because some wingnut will always provide the confirmation that someone else needs to support their bias. Something to remember is that ANYONE can publish something on the WWW without any peer review or supporting evidence...

One or a hundred cigarettes a day makes very little difference - they all do damage.

 

[tenngun]

Is that like one Tylenol or a thousand make no difference, or one coke with cyclamates or a thousand? My dad didn't start smoking a pipe till he was in his fifties smoked till his late eighties. I started him on it. Only stopped when his age of 88 made keeping a pipe going too much trouble
According to Nature seventy five to eighty percent of published peer reviewed papers have little or no 'science' to back them up. And in fact many papers have no information in them at all. Nor should we forget just over the past few years the emails from the English climate study orginazation on how to make fraudulent results and publish them.
Nor should we forget the 90s when the definition of addiction was change just for tobacco and when talking about addiction the rules only apply to tobacco.
Or C E Coop saying he wanted the thrust of research to be toward making tobacco socially unacceptable.
Picture the inquisition and Galileo, what monsters they were. Now in the place of priest we have scientist and if you don't bow at their alter instead of being called heritic thou art called a denier :shake:

 

[Black Hand]

I have no idea what type of papers "they" were reading, but the ones I've read over the last 30 years had plenty of data to support their findings.

Despite all your protestations, science is backed by evidence collected through testing and observation. It isn't based on conjecture or wishful thinking. If you wish to ignore scientific facts, that is entirely up to you, but don't expect others to do so...