Tobacco’s Big Secret
Tobacco has a big secret. Don’t tell anyone.
When research scientists add up the risk factors from all the chemical ingredients in tobacco, they’re way below the number of actual deaths from smoking.
Statistically, the chemicals in tobacco are far less dangerous than we think.
The numbers don’t add up. They’re not even close.
When you plug in Tobacco’s Big Secret, suddenly all the risk vs. death numbers match up.
The secret? Tobacco smoke is radioactive.
It’s true. Google it, or look it up on Wikipedia.
Since the late 1930′s, the tobacco industry has been using a really cheap fertilizer made from the mineral apatite (pronounced just like appetite) that gives tobacco a ‘sweet’ taste (their description, not mine).
Unfortunately, apatite in its natural form has uranium, radioactive polonium, radioactive radon, radioactive lead, radioactive bismuth, and a lot more nasty radioactive stuff all mixed inside.
Apatite is radioactive.
It's cheap, it's tasty, and it's so hot it's SMOKIN'!
Apatite is mined, crushed, processed into a phosphate fertilizer, then applied to the soil in tobacco fields. The radioactive pieces break free, hitch a ride on air currents and bits of dust, then get stuck on the gooey hairs and leaves of the plant. Each year, adding more fertilizer makes the soil — and the plants — even more radioactive.
But remember, it’s cheap and makes the final product taste ‘sweet’ ( YUCK ! ) so they’ll never want to stop using it.
The radioactive chunks stay stuck on through the manufacturing process and are freed when the tobacco is burned. Burning does not “clean” the radioactive particles, it just spreads them into the air.
The smoker inhales this witch’s brew of varied radioactive particles. Many get glued to the lung tissue by the tar in the smoke and start damaging tissue right away, while others take minutes, days, months or years to cause their damage. Some are exhaled and combine with the smoke from the cigarette’s burning end to mix with other second-hand smoke that spreads around the area. The entire area becomes mildly radioactive.
Yep, second-hand smoke is radioactive, too. That’s the actual reason it’s so harmful.
The pieces that remain in the lungs bombard internal organs with nuclear particles long after death. The damage from each radioactive molecule is small, but they’re cumulative. Each day is a little worse than the day before.
How much atomic radiation are we talking about? An op-ed piece in the New York Times in late 2006 tried to flesh out some numbers.
Some scientists try to compare the tissue damage from cigarettes to that caused by a chest X-ray, though they’re not exactly the same kind of damage (one is a ray, this one is a particle that has actual mass and volume and causes far more tissue damage). Older studies get much lower numbers by comparing 1980′s-style X-ray machines, so some old studies quote 300 chest X-rays per year, while others compare 2,000 “modern” chest X-rays each year to a pack-a-day smoker. Modern digital X-ray machines use even less radiation, so comparisons today would be even higher.
You can read some facts at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website on Radiation in Tobacco and Radiation Protection – Tobacco Smoke (intended to protect workers whose jobs involve radioactive specimens) or you can Google the topic and learn more. This would make a great science project for students of any age.
Check out this United States National Institutes of Health NIH.gov training page . The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements has a web page too. They list a chest X-ray at 8 mrem, a year’s worth of average exposure to ordinary stuff like bricks, radon in the basement, air travel (cosmic rays), etc., at 360 mrem (or about 1 mrem each day), and a year of pack-and-a-half a day smoking at 16,000 mrem.
Those figures put less than 1 cigarette per day at more than all the other background radiation we all get. But the radiation from tobacco smoke is the worst kind of all for tissue damage. Alpha particles are pieces of actual matter (instead of a ray of energy) made up of 2 neutrons and 2 protons that bang physically into our own tissue. It’s literally having nucleii blasting into your body about 1/8 of an inch deep, at the speed of light. Repeat forever. Other nuclear events, beta rays and gamma rays, take their turns, too, but the alpha particles do the bulk of the damage.
Even worse, since it creams delicate internal tissues instead of the top (dead) layer of skin, it’s much deadlier than simple background radiation.
Your body tries to heal itself, but it has limits. Damage is spread through the entire body by the bloodstream, so healing is difficult and, eventually, impossible.
When the radiation risk factor is added to the chemical risk factors, the death numbers finally add up.
Bonus: It turns out that people are about 20 times more likely to die from lung cancer today than they were before apatite was used for fertilizer, in spite of much lower smoking rates and tremendous improvements in medical care. Now that’s progress.
While smoking rates went down . . .
The entire PowerPoint presentation from the American Cancer Society can be downloaded from http://www.cancer.org/Search/index?QueryText=cancerstatistic2009slidesrevpp.ppt&x=32&y=17 or
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@nho/documents/document/cancerstatistic2009slidesrevpp.ppt
The story goes that U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop tried to warn the public of all this 20 years ago in a televised message, but went largely unheard. Unfortunately, I can’t find any evidence that he ever said that. Maybe this industry does a really good job of burying things. I guess that would include their lifelong customers.
.
By the way, in the U.S.,
smoking kills about 1 in every 5 people,
about the same percentage that smokes (20% of the U.S. population). Does anyone else see a pattern here? It sounds like everyone who smokes dies of a smoking-related illness. Smokers, on average, live about 12 to 15 years less than non-smokers, and many of those years are very unpleasant.
Of course, there are always stories about George Burns smoking cigars until he was 95. But folks his age grew up in a time when food was wholesome and fresh, air was clean, and walking for miles every day was pretty routine. He got a much better head start on his life than you or me. And remember that imported tobacco, like the kind used in expensive cigars, is unlikely to have apatite-based fertilizer applied to the soil. American tobacco farmers love their special fertilizer, and American cigarette tobacco tastes “sweeter” because of it. Add in many decades of accumulated radiation in the soil and you’ve got a product that’s very unique in mankind’s history. Ol’ George didn’t smoke that stuff.
Every year, nearly a half-million people in the U.S. die from smoking. On average, that’s about 10,000 people from each state. About 1.2 million die annually in Europe (and their package warning labels put ours to shame. Canada has strong anti-smoking labels with graphic photos.) Worldwide, smoking causes one death every 8 seconds.
Smoking-induced diseases like cancer, heart disease, emphysema, stroke, etc., kill more people than the next 6 causes — alcohol, cars, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs — combined.
And I was just joking about, “Don’t tell anyone.”
Tell everybody. Cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that’s what does the damage.
So, why haven’t you heard this anywhere else? There are two schools of thought . . .
First is that if people found out that low levels of radioactivity were harmful, they’d get upset about nuclear power plants. The distinction about “radioactive particles selectively bombarding internal organs” compared with “random rays hitting dead skin that soon sloughs off” would be difficult to pack into a 30-second commercial. Nuclear power plants would get a bad name, even though their emissions are actually much lower than those from a cigarette and a different kind of radioactivity. That’s right; you get far more radiation (and a much worse kind) from smoking than you would living downwind from a nuclear power plant, and it lands and sticks in a much worse place in your body.
The second idea is that the tobacco companies have an awful lot of money, are not known for playing fair or telling the truth, and wouldn’t hesitate to squash anyone like a bug if they tried to bring them down.
Pick one.
Charlie Gosh
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I did some more research after reading your blog. that’s some scary stuff. glad I don’t smoke
how come the gov. wont tell us?
SMOKERS SHOULD BE BANNED
smokers suck hahahaha smokers suck
thats not right r u sure?
I had no idea this is true
smoking is worse than i thouht
how did you find this stuff out? I new smoking was bad, but this is pretty bad
I checked some of your sources and found even more links about radiation in tobacco. If everyone knew about this it would make them think twice about smoking. Can we get this into the hands of highschool teachers?
smokers stink but i didnt knowthey glow in the dark lol
nice blog – have a nice day
cigarets stink
Wonderful article on smoking
my work is nonsmoking now
i agree, smokers suck
dont know if im ready to beleive smokings not that bad for you
Maybe we shud just put em out of there misery
Never mind there alredy killing themselfs
smoking killed both my parents
make em $20 a pack
no thats not right
$30
A guy at work gets canadian cigs. They have photos of dead lungs and stuff. GROSS !
If you don’t like to smoke nobodys forcing you
My boss smokes and he stinks from it. I should tell him to read this.
sorry, got biger problems than smoking
My sister burnt down our house from smokingin bed but nobody got hurt Sucked not having ourhouse and stuff
r u shur?
I never smoked but my frends do
My buddy smokes those electric cigarets
I really tried to quit about 50 times. Its not easy. Believe me. My brother managed to quit, but its a struggle for him to be around me and I know it. I really want to stop smoking. And they keep raising the prices here (New York City) Even the cheap ones are over $75 a carton. I gotta take the subway to Queens every other week to see my ma, and I get cigs there for around $65. I tried those indian brands too but they taste awful. I got a buddy in the army who says he gets them cheap on the base. How come guys in the army get them cheap. He says he can’t smoek on the base so the jokes on him
had no idea
thanks
explains a lot about sick smokers
2nd hand smoke is very bad fo ryou. My brother got throat cancer from our dad smoking.
Didn’t know it was this bad
Thanks for the info
how come i’m not suppost to tell anybody
Trying to quit
I googled this and it’s pretty scary.
I’m staying away from smokers from now on.
they make lots of money from this too
THAT STUFF IS NASTY
Smoking is bad bad bad for you.
Its not legal to smoke here now, should be everywhere.
A guy on the job sight says ‘Nobody making you smoke.’
Well if I’m downwind from you moron yes you are.
Don’t the farmers get sick?
Lots of things are bad for you so don’t pick on cigarettes.
Smokers in Europe are the worst believe me
i had no idea – thanks
I followd some of your links. very valuable
Great information! Thanks!
Can I link up to this, from my web page? I’m planning to gather as many sources of information as I am able.
I really loved this amazing article. Please keep it up. Greets!.
Do you plan to keep this site updated? I sure hope so… its great!
Great post, I bet a lot of work and research went into this article.
great stuff. i didn’t know about this