/lit/ - Literature

>>12109219
>Cigarettes cause cancer and heart disease. This is a well-established fact.
t. CDC warning on the side back of cigarettes with no methodology or anything given to see how this "fact" was arrived at.
If examined, you'll see what was used as the basis for this "fact", were poor, epidemiological studies showing a weak correlation among a non-randomized population sample. Further still, you'll see that most of these studies failed to account for other lifestyle factors (occupational hazard in workplace, BMI, obesity, diet) and lumped all sorts of individuals together, because, well, they were smokers and a little bad methodology to discourage people from smoking, won't hurt anyone they figured.
You are so closed minded that you refused to even consider the case within the post. To you, the only possible explanation for such skepticism are accusation that accosts anyone even remotely questing it as paid tobacco industry shills.

>>11805364
>First of all, your claim that the “most intelligent people of all time smoked tobacco” is not only historically inaccurate, but it also holds no correlation to intelligence.
Bach, Kant, Einstein, Mozart, Beethoven, Faulkner, the list goes on. You would be hard pressed to find a smoker who wasn't a genius.
Your meme implied that intelligent people do not smoke and this is simply untrue.

>Second of all, tobacco is easily the deadliest herb in history. It has essentially no pros pertaining to its effects, and has caused addiction and cancer in many a person throughout history (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079499/).). The only positive effect is that it creates jobs for people. Shitty jobs, but jobs nonetheless.

Patently false. You cited a single article, an historical review of its medical uses, which even uses key phrase "has probably" in the preface.

The case against tobacco is entirely predicated on shoddily conducted non-randomized epidemiological studies, which are systemically, and fatally flawed, and in recent years, are of themselves contradicted by other epidemiological studies that did not have an inherent bias to "prove" it's harm as an a priori objective, i.e. the so called paradoxical studies coming out of Japan in the late 90s and early 2000s, which had 1/10th the instance of lung cancer.

Your claim that it confers no positive effects is also ludicrous. No one would have ever taken up smoking tobacco if it didn't yield some marginal benefit.

Tobacco smoke contains MAOIs, nicotine, Coenzyme Q10, and dozens of other compounds known to positively affect cognition memory wise, and state of mind as an antidepressant. Smoking upregulates telomerase, and doubles the key antioxidants catalase and gluthione, reduces IGF-1, raises youth hormones (DHEA, pregnenolone, testosterone…), upregulates KLOTHO expression, the list goes on and on. It's known to reduce parkinson's disease risk.

Here are studies involving the effects of nicotine and tobacco smoke on memory:
https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#performance

>Thirdly, you call me ignorant and then say something so ignorant as “tobacco smoke isn’t carcinogenic” (https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/healthy-living/carcinogens-tobacco-smoke.html).).

It isn't. You cited a source that looks at constituents found within tobacco smoke, rather than tobacco smoke itself. These constituent, namely benzopyrenes, are found in much greater quantities in cooked meats, which are actually worse if ingested orally given the first pass effect. You can find trace amounts of carcinogens in just about anything.

If you use tobacco smoke, you will be very disappointed to discover that fails to demonstrate carcinogenicity.
All experimental studies involving tobacco smoke itself, on healthy animal subjects, fail demonstrate additional instances of of cancer above that of control.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9608635

>>11150931
Patently false.
You have sample selection bias from the scare campaign of smoking.
You see, intelligent people not presented any counter arguments, generally take the arguments to heart and quit or never start smoking.
Therefore, the remaining population of smokers is horrible and sampling from them, is comprised of people with ill-health and bad lifestyle habits in general. They are not self-conscious about their health, so of course they are statistically more likely as a group to have heart disease. Seldom do epidemiological smoking studies control for lifestyle and dietary habits.
There is nothing inherent to tobacco to suggest it predisposes one to heart disease, even among the ill-health, fat, Americans who smoke garbage commercial cigarettes, they are more likely to survive heart attacks if they smoke.

>Cigarette smoking is a well-established risk factor for cardiovascular disease yet several studies have shown lower mortality after acute coronary syndromes in smokers compared with non-smokers, the so called 'smoker's paradox'

This should come as no surprise.
Tobacco contains Coenzyme Q10 and other cardioprotective compounds. This is why smokers are more likely to survive a heart attacks.
It also has the paradoxical effect of lowering blood pressure for many due to +NO effects. This is why e-cigarettes raise blood pressure and tobacco doesn't.