As any cigar lover will tell you, cigars and cigarettes are in two different leagues. Cigarettes come with a warning label; cigars come with a fancy box. A cigarette might last five minutes; a good cigar can last an hour or more.
While cigarette smoking has steadily declined over the years, cigar smoking has become more popular. Thanks to clever marketing and magazines, cigars have come to symbolize the good life. And, of course, cigars have an aura of pomp and ceremony when they are gifted for the birth of a baby or other celebrations.
But cigars are dangerous. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a cigar emits up to 90 times a cigarette's level of nitrosamines, which are potent cancer-causing compounds.
Chemical stew
Cigars are essentially clumps of aged tobacco wrapped in a tobacco leaf. A premium cigar may hold as much tobacco as a whole pack of cigarettes. The tobacco in a cigar smolders because leaves are much less porous than cigarette paper. This slow burn releases a stew of compounds even more dangerous than cigarette smoke. Cigars are loaded with:
Nitrosamines (a cancer-causing chemical)
Tar
Carbon monoxide
Ammonia
The only saving grace is that most cigar smokers don't inhale. (Unlike cigarette smoke, cigar smoke doesn't need to reach the lungs to provide a nicotine kick.) For this reason, regular cigar smokers are only about twice as likely as people who don't smoke cigars to develop one type of cancer -- lung cancer. By contrast, male cigarette smokers are 22 times as likely as nonsmokers to get lung cancer, and female smokers are 12 times as likely to develop it.
But even if you take dainty puffs, you still bathe your mouth and throat in at least 60 cancer-causing compounds. According to the NIH, smoking one or two cigars daily doubles the risk of cancer of the lips, tongue, mouth, throat or esophagus. If you smoke more than two daily, the risk rises dramatically.
And for cigar smokers -- often ex-cigarette smokers -- who draw the smoke into their lungs, the danger of cancer greatly increases. Compared to nonsmokers, deep inhalers are:
About five times more likely to die of lung cancer
27 times more likely to have cancer in the oral cavity
15 times more likely to have cancer of the esophagus
53 times more likely to have cancer of the larynx
But cancer is only part of the story. Like cigarettes, cigars are hard on the heart. A study of nearly 18,000 men published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that cigars raised the risk of coronary heart disease by 30 percent, and the risk of emphysema rose by 45 percent.
If you smoke cigars, do whatever it takes to quit. Cigars generally aren't as addictive as cigarettes or chewing tobacco, so it should be easier to stop. You may lose a status symbol, but you'll gain much more.
