Venezuelan Chimo

[chimoeltoro]

http://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream...pdf?sequence=1

http://www.ntpd.org.uk/chimo

[squeezyjohn]

Thanks for the info chimoeltoro!

I am delighted that I have the chance to try this product because I am intrigued by all the different ways that tobacco can be processed and the flavours that can produce. Because of that I have tried all sorts of unusual ones like Makla, American dip, scotch snuff etc ... even when I know that they can be much more risky to use than Swedish snus. My regular tobacco is definitely snus though, and that is because I am satisfied that I have seen enough evidence from scientific papers that it is the safest possible use of tobacco I can choose.

I would suggest that the brands you mention which contain tree ash didn't replace Sodium Carbonate, but are continuing to use a more traditional method using unrefined ingredients. I do not know if this would inherently raise the pH further or increase TSNAs as I haven't seen any study about it at all.

Is it true that El Toro chimo contains sugar or molasses? Because that has quite a different impact on the oral health of users of smokeless tobacco in that it can be very bad for the teeth with long term use. None of the commercially available snus brands today contain sugar any more.

The papers you link to are interesting, but none of them have any useful results which suggest that your brand of chimo contains low levels of TSNAs. If you are indeed advertising your product as being as safe as snus, I would suggest that we need to see any real evidence for that.

[chimoeltoro]

Hi SJ.
Your concerns are very important,I'll take them to our respective department. The paper shows TSNA of Tigrito, who looks like our industrial process. . We have decided let know our brand to outside market, supported on the advantages of our Industrial Process, and the apropiate insumes, Sugar is an interesting point, we have made without It. Our primal goal is take advance in manufacturing of a product that can grow in many ways, healthy and sophisticated is one of them. The Snus is pasteurized, and the chimo is boiled but the Leaves are discharged. In fact, the historical investigations are very interesting, holland's and others european countries ships came to maracaibo lake to buy Urao(Sodium Carbonate), Tobacco and Chimo).
I don't invite you to change SNUS, I invite to make the Chimo a better product, and taste it today!!! Enjoy a more safe product than the antique ones. Let me know your impressions. we are not the big swedish Company, But we're taking care at least now our future in our customers.
Thanks SJ:

[squeezyjohn]

Thank you chimoeltoro,

I'm sure we all appreciate you coming on here and letting us know far more than we ever did on this local Venezuelan product.

[mattzq8sonoma]

In the tobacco control paper, from what I see is that TSNA levels of chimo are from 1 ppm total TSNA to about 9 ppm total TSNA for the 5 brands represented, if you average them it comes to about 4.4ppm Total TSNA as is. The range from 1 brand to another is quite broad. The average for SWEDISH snus is around 0.65ppm total TSNA as is & you can also see a VERY flat relationship where the TSNA levels for each products are all very close. So chimo definitely has more TSNA's in it than snus. And because there is probably very little quality control involved in the selection of the tobacco used, that is why the TSNA levels are vastly different.

Normal ideal tobacco production and processing will create about a 1:1 relationship between NNN and NAT. If you look at Swedish snus, that is the case. If you look at every other product on that list, that is not the case. This is due to some problem during the manufacturing or curing or storage or aging process where a nitrosation reaction occurs and throws off this natural balance. This could be from heat, lack of oxygen, too much water, microbial activity, and the combination of these things and other things. Look especially at the products with high NNK (relative to the other nitrosamines for the same sample). Nicotine + nitrite = NNK. Nitrite usually comes from the reduction of nitrate, commonly caused by facultatively anaerobic microbes in need of oxygen who have the ability to reduce NO3 to NO2. NO2 under virtually every condition imaginable when combined with Nicotine will easily and quickly produce NNK. So there is a very clear problem, in regards to the formation of nitrosamines, in the manufacturing process for those products.

Where I am going with this is that if you want to create a "safe" or "safer" tobacco product, you have to understand the whole process that you are doing, and its limitations, and be able to do the analysis at each step to see at what step problems are occurring so you can correct them. Possibly you can create a better chimo (in regards to TSNA) by lowering the temperature while cooking and using as little water as possible to still be able to extract everything out that you want. And if you understand the curing process of tobacco after it is harvested, and have farmers who follow the right procedures during harvesting and curing, you can have a much better product.

[squeezyjohn]

^ and now for the science bit!

I kind of know what mattzq8sonoma is getting at ... and a mixture of my own degree level chemistry and biochemistry allows me to understand what's going on in those papers ... but it's going to look like gobbledegook to anyone without a science background! The people who I really need to demonstrate that they know these things are the ones making the commercial product!

[chimoeltoro]

^ and now for the science bit!

I kind of know what mattzq8sonoma is getting at ... and a mixture of my own degree level chemistry and biochemistry allows me to understand what's going on in those papers ... but it's going to look like gobbledegook to anyone without a science background! The people who I really need to demonstrate that they know these things are the ones making the commercial product!

Yo no manejo este conocimiento con esa profundidad que usted menciona. por favor déjeme remitir a la persona competente que nos hable mas al respecto, por el momentos puedo decir que procesos de fabricación han sido mejorados con asesoría de empresas consultoras en instrumentación y control con mejores practicas y estándares como el uso de acero inoxidable por mencionar algo.
Best Regards

[chimoeltoro]

[QUOTE=squeezyjohn;414199]^ and now for the science bit!

Oh My God... Sorry, I do not have this knowledge with that depth that you mention. Please let me refer to the competent person that we talk more in this regard, for the moment I can say manufacturing processes have been improved with advice from business consultants in instrumentation and control with best practices and standards, such as the use of stainless steel by mentioning something.


Thank you for appropriate reviews

[taffyjock]

Ok question for someone with a bit more science accumen than myself.

Chimo may not have the proven safety of Snus, but how does it seem to stack up against smoking risks?

[mattzq8sonoma]

Ok question for someone with a bit more science accumen than myself.

Chimo may not have the proven safety of Snus, but how does it seem to stack up against smoking risks?

My thoughts, from reading a ton of research and being in the tobacco science field for a long time:

Any kind of smokeless tobacco is better than cigarettes. Simply put, you're not directly inhaling the smoke of something that is burning and you are not exposing your lungs to particulate matter from something that is burning. Even cigars are better than cigarettes, as long as you don't inhale. Your risks are the same for cigars or cigarettes, except for your lung risk, so because you're eliminating 1 risk, therefore there is less total risk. Smokeless tobacco is better more, because you're not exposing yourself to combustion products, from the burning of the tobacco and the additives in the tobacco. So because it's not burning, you're exposing yourself to less harmful compounds. Snus, manufactured to the Swedish Gothiatek standard, is best in terms of safety of smokeless tobacco products, because out of harmful constituents found in tobacco, it contains the least amount of all of those compounds of any other tobacco product.

That said, chimo, in my opinion, doesn't really seem too safe to me. #1 there doesn't seem like there is any quality control done by any of the manufacturers of it, especially the small producers. #2 the production of it is basically the tobacco is having 90% of it's components dissolved and extracted from the lamina/stems/stalks that are used to make it, and then boiled down and concentrated to 10x. From experience, when you use hot water to extract everything you can from tobacco, when what's left (residuals and cell wall/cellulose) is dried, there's only about 10% of the original weight left, which makes sense when they say 10kg tobacco makes about 1kg of chimo. So if you have a bad crop of tobacco in terms of nitrosamines (I've seen 500ppm Total TSNA as an AVERAGE from a whole barn of tobacco), and then you concentrate that to 10x, you could be talking about a serious dose of some nasty stuff, if there are no quality checks being done. If you used that barn I referred to and composited that whole barn so that it was even TSNA throughout the lot, you would be talking about 5000ppm TSNA (0.5%...or 5mg of TSNA per 1g dose...a normal dose of General OP has 8mg Nicotine, so that is a MASSIVE dose of TSNA. ~8,000X higher exposure to TSNA than snus). Granted, that's worst case scenario, but if there is not quality control being done, definitely possible.

[squeezyjohn]

Well my tins arrived a few days ago and I'll put a little review here as this is the thread about it!

The tin is tiny - like the kind you get lip balm in sometimes - but supposedly you don't need very much of it at a time. And the contents ... well that's nothing like snus at all, it's a very hard slightly tacky resin which feels very much like the slightly stickier forms of cannabis resin for those of you who may have seen it. It takes some effort with a strong fingernail or chopstick to get the small pea sized amount you are supposed to use separated from the stuff in the tin. It smells like a mixture of molasses, malt and cigars.

The instruction was to allow this small amount to dissolve on my tongue and spit - but as a snus user I didn't do that and instead put it where my snus normally goes. The initial taste is quite pleasant - very similar to how it smells and slightly sweet. Rather than staying in one piece as snus does - this dissolves in your saliva and very quickly creates a lot of black juice that really has to be spat out - I did swallow a little and it didn't feel like it was going to agree with me! The juice just kept coming and ran all down my teeth - I suppose that was my fault for putting it in my upper lip - but frankly I don't see how it would have been any better placing it on my tongue where the juice would have been created even quicker. As the juice filled my mouth the taste became very much more bitter and overwhelming.

The whole thing probably lasted 10 minutes before I just had to spit the whole thing out for fear of gagging. When there's that much going on it's hard to tell how much nicotine I was actually getting but it felt like a lot for such a small amount of product with a vague sick feeling after which I couldn't tell whether it was due to the nicotine or the experience of having my mouth flooded with black, bitter juice.

In conclusion ... You can probably tell I'm not a convert ... it is not really a replacement or alternative for snus and it certainly doesn't taste like it. Snus is convenient and spit-less ... chimó seems to be the polar opposite of that. It's impossible to know anything much about how this product compares in terms of health risks with such an absence of evidence ... but it certainly feels like a less healthy product to use compared to snus. I think if snus became impossible for me to buy or make and the only alternative was chimó - I would most probably give up tobacco altogether.

[Andy105]

Thanks for your self-experimentation, and review. For a long time, I've wondered if that stuff was tasty, or as nasty as it looked. I'd bet that there's hard core nic addicts out there that take a ball of that stuff, and smoke it from a glass pipe like meth.

[squeezyjohn]

I've got 9 tins left if anyone fancies their luck after reading that! Actually - only 8 as I sent one to Skell today to see how he copes with it (he doesn't know yet).

[taffyjock]

Mines not arrived yet, takes an extra 2 weeks to get over the Severn.

After seeing SJ I'm half hoping it gets lost in the post.

[taffyjock]

Mine arrived today & I followed the instructions messaged me.

Pip size under the tongue, spitting ala dip.

1st attempt 2 mins to get the tin open, another 2 to scrape some out, fingers all dark brown & sticky. Popped in after about 5 seconds all I could taste was marmite, which I hate, spat, but the flavour just got stronger & stronger, maximum 15 seconds I had it in for before feeling queezy. Great start.

2nd attempt a few mins ago was a bit better, managed to almost keep up the spitting & the flavour while still very strong wasn't as bad as the 1st go & managed a few minutes before it got unbearable.

The pros- nic hit is pretty big for such a small amount, hits hard & fast.

The negs- everything else.

I've never dipped, so my spitting technique might be crap, so they may have more joy.

Would I try it again? Probably but I have a liking of self torture.