Nicotine causes cancer and heart disease by itself....

Tuesday, 7-22-2014

Tobacco and tobacco smoke cause heart disease, trigger heart attacks people could have escaped, and cause cancers in every part of the body.

A. They do this even if they were nicotine free.

1.  Tobacco itself is radioactive, so if you contact it or its smoke to your mucous membranes by breathing its smoke -- even if it’s second hand smoke -- or you put tobacco in your nose or mouth, that radioactivity is carried by your blood to everywhere in your body.

Particularly if you use a lighter with its high temperature flame to light tobacco, the many carcinogenic hydrocarbons formed are carcinogenic even without the radioactivity problem.

2.  The carbon monoxide and the bioactive small particle particulates in tobacco smoke can cause heart disease without the nicotine. They cause the damage to the insides of your blood vessels that your body then tries to patch by building up the plaque that builds up to cause heart disease.  (Note that this effect happens to all smokers every single time.  NONE escape it. Even brand new smokers and people who smoke just 4 or 5 cigarettes a day get it just the same with every puff they take.

 And the carbon monoxide may be the main heart attack trigger even if there is no nicotine.

B.  So, given that and the fact that some people have a physical addiction to nicotine, there are methods to help people quit that give them some nicotine after they stop smoking.  For some people this does seem to help.

But what about nicotine itself? 

Is it desirable to get help with the addiction without nicotine or use as little as possible and step down the amount to zero for sure as soon as possible or can you take your time?

If you can quit smoking for sure while stopping the nicotine sooner, we now know that question’s answer is YES:  Stop the nicotine as soon as possible. Or don’t use it!

It turns out that nicotine BY ITSELF causes both cancer and heart disease!

Earlier this year Medical New Today had a story on research showing nicotine helps cause heart disease.

And, last month they reported a study showing that nicotine also causes cancer by itself as well:

Nicotine in e-cigarettes and smoking cessation devices 'carcinogenic'

http://mnt.to/l/4nTT

Research into the carcinogenic properties of nicotine may have severe 

implications for popular smoking cessation devices such as e-cigarettes and 

nicotine patches.

“The study, led by geneticist Jasmin Bavarva, exposed cells to nicotine and compared them to cells that had not been exposed. They found that thousands more mutations were present in the cells that had been exposed to nicotine compared with the control cells.

The patterns of mutation found were similar to those observed in cells experiencing oxidative stress, a known precursor to cancer. The authors conclude that nicotine exposure can adversely affect genes by inducing mutations, and over the period of significant exposure may contribute to increased cancer incidence.

Prof. Harold Garner, director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute's Medical Informatics and Systems Division, says that the results are important:

"For the first time they directly measure large numbers of genetic variations caused only by nicotine, showing that nicotine alone can mutate the genome and initiate a cancer state. This is particularly timely since nicotine is used as a smoking cessation therapeutic."

Add to this the other study that found that nicotine by itself helped cause heart disease and the other comments in the cancer study make sense:

“10.1% of participants trying to quit by using other nicotine replacement therapies were successful

15.4% of participants trying to quit without assistance [from nicotine replacement] were successful.”

Another study found that people who smoked although they got short term stress relief then felt worse later and that people who quit actually quit wound up feeling less stressed.  The problem of course is that few smokers know this.

And, the other problem is that stop smoking programs don’t teach other methods to use for stress as well as it needs to be done.

There is a new way to teach this that may prove to work that is in the training and response to it by successful US Navy Seals who pass that training regimen.  It’s about 20 times harder and more uncomfortable than quitting smoking!  Emulating the SEALS who pass may do the job for people quitting smoking too. (More on that another time.)

Conclusions:

1. Using alternative methods to quit and overcome the physical addiction other than nicotine replacement looks desirable

2.  Using eCigarettes to quit smoking is also a VERY bad idea since the people mistakenly believe that the nicotine in them is safe. It turns out nicotine by itself is nearly as harmful as smoking!

3.  This means that absolutely for sure using eCigarettes in public places should be banned too.  And everywhere smoking is banned so should eCigarettes be banned.