Healthy alternative rule

Casey@lemmy.blahaj.zone to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 857 points –
28

The majority of carcinogens from smoking tobacco are created by burning the plant fibers. Quitting smoking is the number thing someone who smokes can do to improve their health. Vaping exposes individuals to fewer carcinogens than smoking, but still has the negative health impacts of nicotine alone on heart and mental health and still some carcinogen exposure.

SmokeFree.gov has free evidence-based resources to help quit!

I know that, it's just an ironic joke. It's funny because cigarettes are actually worse.

What about the meat based alternative?

Well, if you leave the tar out, it would be better than regular cigarettes. Not sure how that compares to vapes though. The small, cheap ones put burnt copper in your lungs.

Even without tar, you're still breathing in smoke

No arguing. Just comparing apples to other apples.

Safest form of travel isn't airplanes. It's staying home.

I need to start growing my own tobacco.

I've been wanting to do that for a while now but haven't tried it yet because the Wikihow article about growing tobacco says that the last step is to age it for 5-6 years. Turns out that step is optional (it even says so in the article, I just never read past the first bullet point), though you'll get harsh tobacco if you skip it. But I don't smoke, so I don't care about harshness.

Anyway, you should give it a try, maybe it's fun, and working with plants is always a good time :3

We live in a world where I read "high schoolers" and my brain autocorrected it to "high school shooters".

I wonder sometime how bad for the health it is to smoke tabacco leaves, just tabbaco nothing else.

The majority of carcinogens from smoking tobacco are created by burning the plant fibers. Quitting smoking is the number thing someone who smokes can do to improve their health.

SmokeFree.gov has free evidence-based resources to help quit!

Then how come cannabis doesn't have the same cancer profile?

It's mostly about the dose of carcinogens. THC is far less addictive than nicotine, so on average people who exclusively use cannabis inhale less smoke than people who smoke tobacco. A pack a day of cigarettes is a very common amount for people who smoke tobacco. That's 20 cigarettes, or 14-16 grams of tobacco a day. Few people who exclusively use cannabis are smoking 14grams/half oz a day.

There are two other major factors limiting our knowledge of the health impacts of cannabis smoking: 1) it remains federally illegal and therefore hard to get research funding. 2) a large proportion of the studies over the past several decades with people who smoked cannabis were confounded by many of the participants also smoking tobacco

TLDR: it's not great to inhale smoke of any kind, as it does contain an abundance of carcinogens.

There's a growing body of evidence that pot smoke can cause/exacerbate emphysema. It's been nigh on impossible to study the actual health risks associated with marijuana smoke due to it's legal status in most countries. Now that legalization is taking root, don't be surprised if we find out over the next 10-20 years that smoking pot is just as bad, if not worse than tobacco.

The differences in the way people smoke pot over tobacco (unfiltered, inhaling deeply and holding it in vs filtered, short, quick breaths) is known to deposit more tar in the lower respiratory tract. So even if there are fewer bad things in pot smoke per given volume, a lot more smoke is sticking to your lungs, increasing exposure and causing damage.

If you (or anyone else for that matter) are set on inhaling anything other than air, it's best to vape from a harm reduction standpoint. There's several orders of magnitude less nasty shit in vapor than smoke, no matter the substance

I'll let you know how it goes, I'm coming up on about 30 years of smoking the sweet sweet cheeba.

Don't take what I wrote as an indictment, I don't exactly follow my own advice lol. I wish I could still smoke, weed gives me instant panic attacks nowadays. Happy toking!

Is it possible for you to just consume it orally through oils?

I've seen two brands that claim they are nothing but dried tobacco with no additives; but I know that must be bullshit because some of the additives are mandated by the government. Like the shit that makes it go out faster to prevent wildfires.

Those brands are Nat's and American Spirit. They both also taste like dogshit.

Omg I loved Nat's. I had quit smoking cigarettes before they closed down but I was still kind of sad to see them go.

Tobacco tends to contain high levels of Polonium-210, which is radioactive and decays into lead, so.

The problem with cigarettes mostly isn't additives, it's the above, and the fact that smoke in general is bad for you, and contains all sorts of nasty chemicals