Health Risks of Cigars? You Might Be Surprised

There is a very interesting post up over at Our House Blog by David on the comparative health risks of smoking cigarettes versus smoking cigars.

It is a good post, with links to some information from the National Cancer Institute and also has some quotations from FDA spokespeople and the New England Journal of Medicine. Anyone who smokes cigars will want to read it.

The information in the article is an anti-smoking crusader’s worst nightmare.

Why?

Because of some hard facts brought out by the studies that do not support some people’s quasi-religious ban-all-smoking zealotry.

1.) Going into a smoking lounge filled with cigar smokers who are all smoking cigars is about equivalent in danger from carbon monoxide and “second hand smoke” exposure to breathing the air in your car while driving on the highway.

Breathing the air in your car if you are not smoking while driving.

And if no one in your car is smoking.

2.) For all causes of death, there is statistically no significant difference between being a complete non-smoker and smoking one or two cigars a day.

Zero increased risk.

Absolutely nothing that can be demonstrated scientifically in all of the years that scientific studies have been performed that is statistically significant. In fact, the statistics actually seem to show that smoking one or two cigars a day decreases your risk of lung disease and heart disease — but you cannot really say that because the margin of error of the study makes a pro-cigar statement as scientifically meaningless as an anti-cigar statement. The studies show that it really doesn’t matter one way or the other.

Please also remember that if there is no provable increase in risk of death from heart disease, cancer, or any other cause to the person smoking one or two cigars a day, then there is also no provable increase in risk for non-smokers in the same house, restaurant, or bar.

3. Almost all tap water in the United States contains tiny trace amounts of arsenic. Arsenic, of course, is a poison that can kill you if you take enough of it. (Pure water, by the way, can also kill you if you take enough of it, but that’s another story.) The fact that there are tiny amounts of arsenic in tap water doesn’t worry most people enough that they stop drinking water, bathing, or washing their clothes and dishes.

It might interest you to know, as a cigar smoker, that the relative risk of dying from the tiny amount of arsenic in the water you drink is very, very low…but it is still more than 2 1/2 times greater than the “risk” of dying from living with a smoker according to official government statistics.

Cigars are not cigarettes. The proven risk factors are not the same — they are not even close. Cigars should not be regulated in the same way that cigarettes are regulated. Those are the facts, from the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. government.

As I said, the full article with all of the citations is up at Our House Blog. I recommend that you check it out. The information may come in handy.

Posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 11:23 am.