Item — HN Reader

Are you aware of research that studies cigar smoking specifically?

I’ve never been a cigarette smoker but enjoy a cigar a few times (2-3) a week in the summer (4 months or so out of the year). Obviously not smoking is better, but I’d like to have hard data what kind of risk I’m taking.

Ex: is the risk similar to two drinks a day, is the risk similar to enjoying a bonfire or is it similar to an entire pack of cigarettes.

4 comments

Cigar and Pipe smoking increases the risk of oral, throat, and esophageal cancers at a similar rate to cigarettes.

Here's one study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3755640/

That study does not address occasional cigar smokers vs frequent. And almost no cigar study makes the important distinction between black & mild type products (which are considered cigars, often inhaled, and smoked daily if not many per day) and Cuban cigar type deals, which are not inhaled and smoked far more seldom

Pipe smoking is even better. The 1964 Surgeon Generals report found that so long as you don't inhale or smoke more than 3 bowls per day, pipe smokers actually lived an average of 2 years longer than NONSMOKERS.

This is a joke right? 1964 was deep in the era of tobacco companies paying for studies that “proved” health benefits. I could believe pipe tobacco was less harmful than cigarettes by a large margin, but not better than not smoking.

The 1964 Surgeon General's report was the first major government acknowledgement of evidence that smoking was harmful. You might visit this hyperlink: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/history/index.htm

Interesting, I’ll read it, thank you.

I had the following items on cigar/pipe smoking bookmarked, I have not read them yet but they may be of interest to you:

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/91/8/697/2519397

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24457405/

https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...

thank you for the links!

I've been curious about this as well. For me I smoke maybe 2/month...one cigar a week at the very most. My guess is it's negligible compared to all the other toxic clouds we walk through in a given week. But hard data would be useful to see.

Edit: Table 1 might have our answers https://cancercontrol.cancer.gov/sites/default/files/2020-08...

I would guess it’s roughly linear. Should be good enough as an approximation. So if smoking daily is, say, -8 years life expectancy then smoking weekly is probably around -1 year. Once it’s very infrequent like once a month it’s probably negligible.

This is exactly what I was looking for. It seems like toning down to 1-2 cigars has measurable benefits but is about what I expected, especially with lung cancer.