Sure, here's the answer to your riddle. Each culture has it's unique set of circumstances, climate, diet and lifestyles. Why do Blacks get Sikle Cell Anemia? Or, you could ask yourself why Japan has a 12x increase in Liver Cancer.
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It is no mystery that cigarettes contain far more than tobacco. Perhaps Japan has laws limiting the amount of toxic substances that the US Tobacco companies ADD to your cigarettes to make the Nicotine more addictive. This list is NOT found in natural tobacco; it is added to the cigarette intentionally, and contains the following:
Acetone - A flammable, colorless liquid used as a solvent. It's one of the active ingredients in nail polish remover. The tobacco industry refuses to say how acetone gets into cigarettes.
Ammonia - A colorless, pungent gas. The tobacco industry says that it adds flavor, but scientists have discovered that ammonia helps you absorb more nicotine - keeping you hooked on smoking.
Arsenic - A silvery-white very poisonous chemical element. This deadly poison is used to make insecticides, and it is also used to kill gophers and rats.
Benzene - A flammable liquid obtained from coal tar and used as a solvent. This cancer-causing chemical is used to make everything from pesticides to detergent to gasoline.
Benzoapyrene - A yellow crystalline carcinogenic hydrocarbon found in coal tar and cigarette smoke. It's one of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals in the world.
Butane - A hydrocarbon used as a fuel. Highly flammable butane is one of the key ingredients in gasoline.
Cadmium - A metallic chemical element used in alloys. This toxic metal causes damage to the liver, kidneys, and the brain; and stays in your body for years.
Formaldehyde - A colorless pungent gas used in solution as a disinfectant and preservative. It causes cancer; damages your lungs, skin and digestive system. Embalmers use it to preserve dead bodies.
Lead - A heavy bluish-gray metallic chemical element. This toxic heavy metal causes lead poisoning, which stunts your growth, and damages your brain. It can easily kill you.
Propylene Glycol - A sweet hygroscopic viscous liquid used as antifreeze and as a solvent in brake fluid. The tobacco industry claims they add it to keep cheap "reconstituted tobacco" from drying out, but scientists say it aids in the delivery of nicotine (tobaccos active drug) to the brain.
Turpentine - A colorless volatile oil. Turpentine is very toxic and is commonly used as a paint thinner.
These chemicals are added for one purpose and one purpose only. These chemicals are designed to convert the cigarette into a Nicotine Delivery unit. The amount of nicotine is regulated; however the intent is to make the nicotine highly REACTIVE, so you get a bigger buzz from a smaller amount of nicotine. Unfortunately, to do this they add some really nasty toxins to their product.
"Sure, here's the answer to your riddle. Each culture has it's unique set of circumstances, climate, diet and lifestyles."
Actually, the biggest factor in all of this is genetics. As you state above, exposure to tobacco smoke plays absolutely no role and first hand smoking creates a slightly higher risk.
With regards to your list of chemicals that you provided, they are encountered daily by everyone in doses far higher than the doses delivered by cigarettes. One example is Arsenic, it is contained in our water supply at higher doses than it is contained in cigarettes.
When the EPA was asked to set exposure limits to SHS, they found that they already had exposure limits set for the elements contained in SHS. These already established limits far exceeded the levels even possible to be reached in a closed room with many smokers constantly smoking cigarettes. When requested to lower the exposure limits to include SHS, they found that it would have made manufacturing impossible.
Chemicals? Yes.
We live in an intensely chemical-phobic society, one where food labels and menus brag of being "all-natural" and "purely organic." Poultry sections offer fryers from "happy, free range chickens." "Chemical-free" cuisine is in.
So it may come as a shock to you that even an all-natu- ral holiday feast (and every other meal you consume throughout the year) comes replete with chemicals, including toxins (poisons) and carcinogens (cancer-causing chemicals) - most of which average consumers would reject simply on the grounds that they can't pronounce the names.
Assume you start with an appetizer, then move on to a medley of crispy, natural vegetables, and proceed to a traditional stuffed bird with all the trimmings, washing it down with libations of the season, and topping it all off with some homemade pastries.
You will thus have consumed holiday helpings of various "carcinogens" (defined here as a substance that at high dose causes cancer in laboratory animals), including:
* hydrazines (mushroom soup);
* aniline, caffeic acid, benzaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, quercetin glycosides and psoralens (your fresh vegetable salad),
* heterocyclic amines, acrylamide, benzo(a)pyrene, ethyl carbamate, dihydrazines, d-limonene, safrole and quercetin glycosides (roast turkey with stuffing);
* benzene and heterocyclic amines (prime rib of beef with parsley sauce);
* furfural, ethyl alcohol, allyl isothiocyanate (broccoli, potatoes, sweet potatoes);
* coumarin, methyl eugenol, acetaldehyde, estragole and safrole (apple and pumpkin pies);
* ethyl alcohol with ethyl carbamate (red and white wines).
Then sit back and relax with some benzofuran, caffeic acid, catechol, l,2,5,6,-dibenz(a)anthra- cene with 4-methylcatechol (coffee).
And those, all produced courtesy of Mother Nature, are only the carcinogens you just scarfed down. Your l00-percent natural holiday meal is also replete with toxins - popularly known as "poisons." These include the solanine, arsenic and chaconine in potatoes; the hydrogen cyanide in lima beans and the hallucinogenic compound myristicin found in nutmeg, black pepper and carrots.
Now here is the good news: these foods are safe.
Four observations are relevant here:
* When it comes to toxins, only the dose makes the poison. Some chemicals, regardless of whether they are natural or synthetic, are potentially hazardous at high doses but are perfectly safe when consumed at low doses like the trace amounts found in our foods.
* While you probably associate the word "carcinogen" with nasty-sounding synthetic chemicals like PCBs and dioxin, the reality is that the more we test naturally occurring chemicals, the more we find that they, too, cause cancer in lab animals.
* The increasing body of evidence documenting the carcinogenicity (in the lab) of common substances found in nature highlights the contradiction we Americans have created up to now in our regulatory approach to carcinogens: trying to purge our nation of synthetic carcinogens, while turning a blind eye to the omnipresence of natural "carcinogens."
* While animal testing is an essential part of biomedical research, so is commonsense. A rodent is not a little man. There is no scientific foundation to the assumption that if high-dose exposure to a chemical causes cancer in a rat or mouse, then a trace level of it must pose a human cancer risk.
If we took a precautionary approach with all chemicals and assumed that a rodent carcinogen might pose a human cancer risk ("so let's ban it just in case"), we'd have very little left to eat. (A radical solution to our nation's obesity problem!)
The reality is that these trace levels of natural or synthetic chemicals in food or the environment pose no known human health hazard at all - let alone a risk of cancer.
So the next time you hear a self-appointed "consumer advocate" fret about the man-made "carcinogen du jour" and demand the government step in and "protect" us - remember, you just ingested a meal full of natural carcinogens without a care in the world and with no risk to your health.
Pass the methyl eugenol! Bon Appetit!
Elizabeth M. Whelan is president of the American Council on Science and Health