Daily Archives: July 10, 2009

Cigarette smoke affects the whole planet as well as the smokers’ lungs. Unfortunately smokers can’t change the smoking effects.
While there’s nothing the smokers can do for to totally absolve all cigarette damages, there are a few things to keep in mind.
Tobacco is not a totally safe product. Because it’s very sensitive to disease, it needs a lot of pesticides. For example in the United States, tobacco farmers use 27 million pounds of the stuff every year. And a very small proportion of the 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides used in the United States, but growing tobacco results in the use of more pesticide per acre than raising most other crops, like: potatoes, tomatoes, citrus, grapes, and apples use more.
Tobacco differ from all crops, and even it method of drying is a special one. The most common method of drying out tobacco leaves, called flue curing, needs an external warmth source.
All over the world, where 85 percent of the world’s tobacco is grown, usually it is cured in a wood-burning fire. But in the United States, tobacco curing is more likely to be fueled by oil, coal, or liquid petroleum gas.
The tobacco addiction can be lessening by switching to organically grown leaf, which at least addresses the pesticide issue. Organic tobacco is still cured using external heat.
Surely organic cigarettes aren’t quit better for smokers’ health than traditional brands. Most of the unsafe components found in secondhand smoke come from burning of the leaf itself, rather than from chemical additives. So a “natural” tobacco cigarette will still produce carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and sticky, carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Scientists found that toxic nitrosamines are formed during the tobacco curing process, which is a very big problem.
Anti-smoking researchers showed in a lot of studies that cigarette emits about 14 milligrams of fine particulate matter, the small little fragments that can get stuck in lungs and cause health problems. And statistics show that the global tobacco industry manufactures approximately 5.5 trillion cigarettes annually.
Unfortunately there’s not much smokers can do on the air-pollution furthermore smoking less. But choosing a different kind of cigarette won’t help. For example R.J. Reynolds does produce a cigarette like product called the Eclipse, in which charcoal is used to heat the tobacco, rather than burn it. The Eclipse produces 86 percent to 90 percent less particulate matter than a traditional cigarette, which makes it a better choice, environmentally speaking. But claims that it’s a “safer” smoke overall are as yet unproven, and its founder is being sued over the matter.