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Very empirical, but earlier this year I was talking to a Thai street food cook who mentioned he was scared of getting cancer from the cooking fumes, because he knew many people who were also cooks and got ill.
N95s will definitely help in this situation.
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Humorously, the CDC claims smoking lowers mortality for people prone to depression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37923037 (Ignore the downvotes this will likely get. People seem to knee-jerk have an issue with me saying anything at all about health. It's meaningless noise.)
I guess that makes sense. I mean I'm not depressed and I never have been but I know that cigarettes gave stability to a lot of friends I had when younger who had those kind of issues. Less likely to fall off the deep end and probably kept them more functional and taking care of themselves. Does it make them less depressed? As an aside on the downvotes: i mean, whatever works for you! People downvote but they're not y…
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I guess that makes sense. I mean I'm not depressed and I never have been but I know that cigarettes gave stability to a lot of friends I had when younger who had those kind of issues. Less likely to fall off the deep end and probably kept them more functional and taking care of themselves. Does it make them less depressed? As an aside on the downvotes: i mean, whatever works for you! People downvote but they're not y…
Cigarettes do make some people less depressed. Some depression medications are known to help people stop smoking.
Probably depression is a complex thing with distinct pathologies covered by one word that can’t capture all the causes, even tho symptoms overlap across distinct types. Gut brain important too.
Everyone’s different. I didn’t get COVID but my spouse got it and we lived in a very dense part of the world during it. Before taking a crowded train my body would crave a cigarette, not for the anxiety, would be like the night before, but I figured out it was warming up my immune system. Maybe the oxidative chemicals in the smoke also kill virus and bacteria too. I very seldom get halitosis but I find a cigarette knocks it out and it doesn’t come back. Everyone’s different tho which is also science: epigenetics etc.
I think occasional tobacco aligns with its historical use as a shamanic or medicinal herb. I love the nicotine high but I’ve never been addicted compulsively so I never got into it, but occasional is good. Track my health across years where I have a couple cigarettes versus none at all and it’s better in those moderation years. Very occasional is good for my qi too.
It’s funny tho that CDC admits it improves depression in some. Haha
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Very empirical, but earlier this year I was talking to a Thai street food cook who mentioned he was scared of getting cancer from the cooking fumes, because he knew many people who were also cooks and got ill.
s/empirical/anecdotal/
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Also worth remembering that cancer isn’t the only bad thing smoking does to you. 7/10 smokers (2/3) die of a smoking related illness.
Any idea of what percentage of non-smokers die of a smoking related illness?
Longer answer: Logically, the answer should be zero, but it's actually not that simple to categorise either 'non-smokers' or 'a smoking-related illness'.
Taking lung cancer as an example, approximately 10-20% of lung cancers occur in folks who are non-smokers (defined as 'never' or 'fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime'). Researchers estimate that of these, around 20% are caused by second hand smoking, meaning that around 8-16% of lung cancers are non 'smoking related' in non-smokers. Not all lung cancers result in death.
So if we take the same approach, and consider the 80% of lung cancers which occur in smokers, presumably similarly 10-20% of those would have developed lung cancer regardless of whether they smoked or not, so potentially we would need to say that less than 65% of lung cancers are caused by smoking.
Is it then fair to call lung cancer a 'smoking-related illness', if more than a third of people who develop lung cancer did not do so because they themselves smoked[0] (the number changes to 70% if we consder the folks who hypothetically develop lung cancer due to second-hand smoking as 'smoking-related').
There are also a lot a problems with the methodology here. How do we know whether someone really smoked 100 cigarettes or fewer? Is there any statistically significant difference between people who smoked 100 and 1 000? 100 000? Does it matter if someone smoked all of those 10 000 in the last year (almost 30 a day) or whether they smoked those 10 000 over the past 50 years (less than a pack a month)? All of these things seem to my mind to be problematic and make it impossible to answer your question.
I suppose that means that I was overconfident in my assertion in the parent comment that '7/10 smokers die of smoking-related illnesses'. It was not unresearched (although uncited) and I got this number from this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/26/the-t..., which in turn reported on this study: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291....
However, perhaps I wasn't critical enough in my reading, and instead simply parroted the stat.
[0]: big caveat here is that my ramblings don't consider the possibility that a 50 year-old who would otherwise have developed lung cancer at 80 develops lung cancer as a result of smoking, and lung cancers caused by smoking stop lung cancers developing from other causes.
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this is correct. it's clear that smoking elevates cancer risk, but why doesn't it cause cancer in all smokers? to develop a cure, we must better understand the causal mechanisms. this starts with acknowledging what we know and don't know about a devilishly complex disease that is arguably better conceptualized as a broad category rather than one monolith -- similar to how the flu, cold, and covid could be grouped und…
I think we understand the causal mechanism pretty well. it is just laypeople struggle with binary thinking vs probability. The reason why only 20% of smokers get cancer is similar to why a person doesn't get cancer after 1 cigarette. This is only counterintuitive if your default thinking is that smoking=cancer. In reality, there are a lot of variable chemical and biological processes involved, but ultimately it ultim…
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Any idea of what percentage of non-smokers die of a smoking related illness?
Short answer: no. Longer answer: Logically, the answer should be zero, but it's actually not that simple to categorise either 'non-smokers' or 'a smoking-related illness'. Taking lung cancer as an example, approximately 10-20% of lung cancers occur in folks who are non-smokers (defined as 'never' or 'fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime'). Researchers estimate that of these, around 20% are caused by second han…
> Over 50% of Asian American women who have lung cancer have never smoked Is this really that surprising, considering that only 2.6%[1] of Asian American women smoke? If 0% of Asian American women smoked, then 100% of the lung cancer cases would come from non-smokers. As it is, the group with the lowest percentage of smokers should have the highest percentage of lung cancer cases in non-smokers. The article gives no…
It’s sad to see this kind of stuff published.