There Are How Many Additives In Cigarettes?

I recently came across an article entitled “599 Ingredients and Additives in Cigarettes”, and there are a few points worthy of note here:

1. 599 additives in a single type of product is a staggering amount, and you have to ask whether they are all necessary. For example, if you removed just one of them would anybody be able to tell the difference? Given that smoking has, over time, been shown to impair your sense of both smell and taste, I suspect not
2. While it says that these additives have been approved as food additives, it’s worth bearing in mind that a large number of additives have never actually been formally tested (other than by the companies who create or use them, who are often allowed to self-report). See “Hundreds Of Additives Not Tested By FDA” for more information.
3. Many of those ingredients have chemical-sounding names, but this does not mean, of course, that they are necessarily bad. All of those ingredients, even the ones that sound natural (e.g. apple juice concentrate), are still chemicals. And the old adage that if you can’t pronounce the name of an ingredient then you shouldn’t be ingesting it is not a reliable guide to what is and isn’t safe.
4. The large array of ingredients that are based on fruits, herbs, and spices (e.g. cinnamon, fenugreek, licorice, nutmeg, tangerine, vanilla) shows the lengths the manufacturers go to in order to make their product more palatable (or less unpalatable).
5. With that many ingredients, it would seem reasonable to assume that the quantities of each one, in a single cigarette, are minuscule – and yet they are presumably there for a specific purpose, so you have to wonder if maximum safe limits have been scientifically determined for all 599 of them – when ingested as used (i.e. by heating and inhaling).
6. That cigarettes are hazardous to your health has been known about for decades – even though doctors used to recommend smoking and endorse specific brands. However, the risks of passive smoking (i.e. inhaling somebody else’s cigarette smoke) have been more contentious.

   The article, which states that cigarette smoke has been proven to contain 7,000 chemical compounds (e.g. arsenic, benzene. carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide), including 250 poisonous and 70 carcinogenic ones, would seem to confirm that inhaling the smoke is harmful too.

   What this means is that, even if you don’t care about your own health, you may well be damaging other people whose only mistake was being in the presence of cigarette smokers – or, perhaps worse still, being a foetus in the womb of a smoker.

On a personal note, both my parents smoked, as did all four grandparents, and I always found it extremely unpleasant.

Particularly bad were being in the back seat of the car when my mum and dad were smoking in the front, and the three times a week my maternal grandparents would come for dinner and, afterward, play cards or dominoes, because the combined smoke from their cigarettes rose up in a thick, murky column and then peeled out across the ceiling like a nicotine mushroom cloud.

Fortunately, I was away at boarding school for about eight months a year, from being seven to seventeen, so it could have been worse.

I also remember the odd occasion when, years later, I got into a smoking carriage on the London Underground by mistake (or, during rush hour when there was little choice), and feeling nauseated by the time I reached my destination because of the smell.

For me, then, and countless others who prefer not to be surrounded by the unpleasantness of cigarettes, it’s good that smoking is being banned in more and more public places, and even in cars if children are also present.

Even though my health may have been affected by all of that smoking going on around me – there is, of course, no easy way to tell 40+ years later – I am grateful in a way that I grew up in that polluted environment, because never once have I felt the urge to smoke, purely because of the unpleasantness I experienced as a child.

Maybe, if my family had not been smokers, I would have started during my teenage rebellion stage.

Back then, of course, in the early 1960s, the dangers of smoking were not widely known, but these days, when nobody seriously doubts that tobacco causes harm, it does surprise me how many people still do smoke, although it is on the decline, finally.

Sadly, though, the world around us is still incredibly toxic compared to only a century or so ago, but at least this is one area where people are beginning to change.

Finally, let me leave you with this classic sketch by Bob Newhart:

Alternative Links

If any of the original links referenced in this article no longer work, you can try the following alternative links:

• 599 Ingredients and Additives in Cigarettes
• 599 Ingredients and Additives in Cigarettes (PDF version)
• Hundreds Of Additives Not Tested By FDA (PDFversion)

Additional Resources

These are suggestions for those who wish to delve deeper into any of the above:

1. Overcome Smoking Hypnosis Program
2. Stop Smoking Books