I have already touched upon the question of unfounded accusations of tobacco and cigarettes: "Is smoking dangerous for your … diseases?"
But, as it turned out, this was only the beginning. It would be necessary to make several posts, after which you will stop twitching while lighting a cigarette and you will not feel lousy if suddenly the tobacco smoke is blown by the wind on your child.
There are quite significant facts on the network that the anti-tobacco company deployed around the world is nothing more than a witch hunt and pursues slightly different goals than it declares. Let's not go into conspiracy theory now, just look at things sensibly. As we always do, with the help of scientists.
Let's start with a historical perspective
(materials from Barry Groves PhD used)
Smoking, especially cigarette smoking, was first recognized as a cause of lung cancer in the 1950s. He was subsequently blamed for many other ailments, including cardiovascular disease. But while there are many articles in the medical literature suggesting that smoking is a causative factor in these diseases, there is also a significant amount of work that refutes. Here we are not talking about isolated dissidents.
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Demands to quit smoking in order to reduce the number of heart diseases have been consistently voiced for more than half a century. At the same time, the current paradigm of human existence began to form - we lower cholesterol, go on a diet and exercise in the name of longevity. Purely four of the apocalypse.
The decline in coronary heart disease (CHD) has begun to be seen as a consequence of national smoking cessation and healthy eating habits.
However, the graphs of the increase in heart disease in different age groups in the United States in the nineteenth century and their subsequent fall from 1900 to 1978, just accounted for the active smoking of the population. The graphs drawn by the researchers clearly showed that there was no connection.
Other studies have shown similar results. Facing difficulties in validating the global axioms of the dangers of smoking, team leader Marmot MG and his colleagues looked at trends in heart disease deaths in 18 countries around the world. They compared differences between men and women and between social classes in England and Wales. They also studied trends in attitudes towards smoking and dietary habits. It was noted that no factor is responsible for all changes.
Talking about smoking, they explain:
And further:
Not surprisingly, data that primarily emphasized an increased male tendency to heart attacks, which overlapped with coronary heart disease. It turned out that the trends in mortality from coronary heart disease in both sexes did not want to keep up with the ideas about the dangers of smoking.3
For example, the following conclusions flew by the box office:
In 1987, Dr. J Shepherd and colleagues noted that the assumption that the decline in heart disease in the United States, Finland, Israel, Australia is the result of dietary adjustments and smoking cessation was wrong.
"The decline in heart disease can be attributed to the success of the national policy to get the general population to quit smoking and switch to diets low in saturated fat." But they also note that changes in mortality and morbidity began before these initiatives had an effect.
Smoking can be beneficial
The Framingham Heart Study, published in 1989, looked at evidence of smoking in combination with coronary artery disease in men and women in their thirties and found no evidence that smoking increases the risk of coronary artery disease.
Smoking can be beneficial: “… almost none of the risk factors for women is greater than 1. In fact, most of the risk factors are slightly below unity. This indicates that CHD is more likely to be found among nonsmokers than among smokers."
Even the experience of smokers has a positive effect on the prognosis of coronary artery disease with the onset of old age. Older smokers in Framingham's data have a lower relative risk of coronary artery disease than younger smokers, despite the presumably longer duration of smoking in the older group.
“The results were amazing: the percentage of coronary artery disease was higher in never smokers than in those who quit. The corresponding age-related incidence of ischemic heart disease … at 12-year follow-up after the 4th survey was 8.3 / 1000 for former smokers and 12.0 / 1000 for never smokers"
And in the end, influenced by the facts, scientists publicly confirmed the conclusion, stating that "the Framingham data … has always shown that men who never smoked had higher mortality rates than men who quit …"
"… the strange conclusion is that it is better to smoke and quit than never to smoke."
Three other attempts to find addiction, confirmed Framingham's data:
The London Civil Servants univariate study of smoking found no benefit in quitters (J Epidemiol Commun Med 1982; 36: 102-8);
a two-way study in Oslo (diet and smoking) showed lower risks of coronary artery disease in nonsmokers, but it was not cigarettes, but changes in cholesterol (J Oslo City Hosp 1982; 32: 31-54);
MRFIT found no significant differences in overall mortality or mortality from coronary heart disease, despite the fact that it even specifically discarded some of the evidence that favored cigarettes (JAMA 1982, 249: 1465-77).
Secondhand smoke also has benefits
Smoking itself might not be so worrisome to governments if cigarette lovers did not breathe out smoke, but accumulated it somewhere inside themselves. But the smoke comes out. And many have been convinced that it is harmful.
The official position of tobacco fighters is that others are in danger, which means that this is no longer a personal matter of a person, what to take in his mouth, but a public one. But some facts suggest otherwise.
Here is the largest study we could find on the effects of secondhand smoke. Studied 118,094 people for almost forty years.
In late 1959, the American Cancer Society enrolled 118,094 adults for its Cancer Prevention Study (CPSI). They were tracked from 1960 to 1998. Particular attention was paid to 35,561 persons who had never smoked themselves, but who had a smoking spouse.
The aim of the study was to determine the relative risk of death from coronary heart disease, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and to associate with active smoking spouse.
What the researchers found was not expected by anyone. Throughout the experiment from 1960 to 1998, the age-adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) for non-smokers married to smokers versus non-smokers living with non-smokers was:
Men (9619)
0.94 (0.85 to 1.05) for coronary artery disease, 0.75 (0.42 to 1.35) for lung cancer and
1.27 (0.78 to 2.08) for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
Women (25,942)
1.01 (0.94-1.08) for ischemic heart disease
0.99 (0.72 to 1.37) for lung cancer, 1.13 (0.80 to 1.58) for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Note that a risk score of less than 1.0 indicates an advantage, more than 1.0 indicates harm. Thus, in men, secondhand smoke increased the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by about 27%, but reduced the risk of coronary heart disease by 6%, and, quite surprisingly, decreased the risk of lung cancer by 25%.
In women, secondhand smoke had little or no significant effect, except for a mild increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
No significant links were found between environmental tobacco smoke and increased disease. even when the manipulations removed from the calculations nonsmoking objects that dared to get sick or die across the party line.
Weaker? According to their data, they should have loudly declared that secondhand smoke cures these two diseases. At least for men.
So how did smoking take on its demonic form?
In 1976, two scientists, under the ridiculous names Kukla and Peto, published a document reporting that the daily consumption of cigarettes by British doctors, which were studied in connection with the 1964 report of the Surgeon General, had dropped from 9.1 in 1951 to 3.6 in 1971 year. Kukla and Pete said that, as a result, the death rate from lung cancer among doctors was reduced by 38%.
However, in a review of the work of Kukla and Peto, Philip R. Yu. Burch, professor of medical physics (biophysics) at the University of Leeds, showed that Doll and Peto made a critical mistake: they compared lung cancer death rates among doctors with lung cancer deaths for the entire British male population. Birch reworked the data to compare physicians to physicians and showed that the risk of lung cancer among physicians who quit smoking actually increased by 31%.
In the same paper, Birch wrote about the consumption of cigarettes by women and men in England and Wales, and it clearly showed the positive effect of smoking on death from lung cancer between 1890 and 1971. He found that the greatest increases in lung cancer mortality in both sexes occurred during the time periods 1916-1920 and 1931-35. These periods were at a time when cigarette consumption among women in England and Wales was very low. From this, Birch concluded that the rise in lung cancer was due to better diagnostics, not smoking.
In England and Wales, there was in fact a 30-year gap between the start of smoking for men and women. So it’s not surprising that rabid anti-smoking activists in Britain were brandishing the “fact” that the recent (in 1966) increase in lung cancer among women was the result of a “30-year incubation period”.
Birch actually rebutted this argument by plotting graphs of lung cancer rates in males from 1906-1926 versus women's rates from 1936 to 1966. It became apparent that if the incubation theory was correct, the two curves would have to be the same; but they were completely different.
Contrary to all the evidence, the hypothesis of Dolls and Peto has already been raised on the flag by anti-smoking lobbyists and now cigarettes are blamed for almost every disease known to man.
Ban on publications
There is also the problem of pushing in publications. The green light is always on for research that supports the point of view of the editor, advertisers and the public. If they are not politically correct they do not print them.
Bias is not uncommon among medical journals in the selection of articles for publication, but it is especially pretentious in relation to tobacco and smoking.
In short, it’s not that I’m advising you now to run away with a pack of cigarettes, everything has its own nuances, but I really hope that you will stop thinking about the inevitable dangers of smoking when you drag on a cigarette.
