Swedish Moist Tobacco Shortens Your Life

People think that the problem with tobacco consists in the act of smoking and that other methods of consuming tobacco would be less harmful. It seems they are wrong: a 30-year long research on the use of snus, Swedish moist tobacco, revealed that the stuff shortens your life.

30% of the 10,000 male subjects of the study died during the follow-up period. Most of them were smokers and common conditions were heart and tobacco-related cancer.

The consumption of snus appeared to boost the risk of premature death by around 10% compared to those who do not consume tobacco at all, as the authors told the Upsala Nya Tidning newspaper.

"Even if smoking is without question a much greater threat to health than snus, our research rejects the view that the use of Swedish snus is in principle without risk," said Dr. Ann Roosaar at the Odontological Institute at Karolinska Institutet in Solna.

The research started in the middle of the '70s with the examination of the mouth of most of the men in the municipalities of Enk�ping and H�bo. The subjects also completed a questionnaire assessing their tobacco and alcohol consumption.

"In contrast to previous studies, this one shows that mouth and throat cancers were more common among users of snus," said Roosaar. Snus is consumed by placing a pinch of it inside the mouth under the upper lip. The final results pointed that snus consumers were indeed more likely to experience mouth and throat cancers than non-snus users, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

In 2005, an American research made at Johns Hopkins University had shown that smokeless tobacco, like snuff and chewing tobacco, was not an effective replacement for tobacco cigarettes. Scientists signal that snuffing tobacco induces a false sense of security in consumers, while causing them long-term carcinogen exposure.