Pretty much everyone in our society understands the harmful effects that cigarettes offer. There are hundreds of advertisements, commercials, even billboards expressing the disgust they contain. It is a lot more unlikely that you will see a billboard revealing the harms of cigars. Cigars seem to almost have a celebratory connotation. They appear to be a topic of use at events such as weddings, birthdays, even graduation. Why is this? Why are cigars used as celebratory objects while cigarettes are viewed as death in a stick? Is one better/healthier than the other? To figure this out, I decided to research and compare the harmful effects of the two.
To start, I wanted to understand what each object was exactly, so I found their definitions:
Cigar: A cylinder of tobacco rolled in tobacco leaves for smoking.
Cigarette: A thin cylinder of finely cut tobacco rolled in paper for smoking.
These definitions are almost exactly the same, despite a few additional words. One main difference I found between the two products is that cigars can come in a variety of sizes and weights while cigarettes are typically uniform. I guess this gives cigars more of an appeal, since they can cater to a larger audience. By why does this make them more special? Large cigars can contain more than half an ounce of tobacco. This is equal to as much tobacco as a pack of cigarettes, taking nearly an hour or two to smoke it. How about the nicotine comparison? According to DoctorsLounge, a website dedicated to providing educated answers from physicians, most cigarettes deliver about 1-2 mg of nicotine to the smoker while a cigar tends to have 100-200 mg. This is an astounding difference.
In conclusion, it is quite obvious that both products are destructive to ones health and should be avoided at all costs. I’d say it’s still up to interpretation on which one is healthier; it depends on a variety of factors from consistency of use to types, etc. Hopefully, however, there will be more publicity on the harms of cigar use since that seems to be lacking at this team. I am interested to see if this will change in the coming years.
Based on everything you’ve said about how “cigarettes deliver about 1-2 mg of nicotine to the smoker while a cigar tends to have 100-200 mg” and how “large cigars can contain more than half an ounce of tobacco which is equal to as much tobacco as a pack of cigarettes” wouldn’t you think cigars are just as or maybe even more harmful than cigarettes? But, you never hear about cigars in the news which confuses me…
Like you said, they are looked at as a celebratory treat rather than a major health risk like cigarettes which are basically miniature versions of them by description.
I found that:
-” Daily cigarette smokers and daily cigar smokers have similar levels of risk for oral cancers.”
-“Smokers who smoke more than five cigars per day have lung cancer risks comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”
-“The real difference between cigar and cigarette smoking is the type of cancers that cigar smokers develop, which is usually a head or neck cancer instead of the lung cancer so common among cigarette smokers.”
-“Unlike cigarettes, cigars do not have filters to reduce their tar and nicotine content. Cigar packages do not carry the Surgeon General’s health warnings that are required on other tobacco products.”
-“Like cigarettes, the additives in cigars are not regulated by any consumer or governmental agency and do not have to be reported or put on the label.”
Basically pointing out the fact that the only reason behind the sudden cigar popularity is because we are less educated on their harmful effects. They don’t have to have to have warning labels or addictive facts reported on their wrappings like cigarettes to warn you what you’re about to inhale into your body. But, people will still try to argue that cigars are commonly used only for occasion and not daily so they aren’t as bad as cigarettes.