To begin I'm in pharmacy school so I have a some credibility as to what I'm talking about. I was a smoker from when I was 16 years old until I discovered smokeless tobacco. I stopped smoking (except for the occasional monte cristo) and went started full time dipping. I started snusing with marlboro and phillip morris snus to get through work (I'm a math tutor at an afterschool education firm part time) and decided to see if there were other brands as I was getting burnt out on all of the peppermint and frost. I found out that snus is by and by the most harmless way to use tobacco and decided to go to swedish snus full time.
So, onto the meat of this thread. I'm sure that most people on this forum are well educated on the health effects of snus so I'll skip the standard rigmarole of saying how great it is to be able to discreetly use a tobacco product that doesn't negatively effect your health. Most of us know that smoking is a major contributing factor to heart disease and cardiovascular damage. This is in part due to the fact that when the smoke is inhaled into the lungs the carbon monoxide bonds with hemoglobin (you know, the oxygen carrying molecule in red blood cells) and distributes poisonous carbon monoxide throughout all the cells in the body. However, there is still a substantial risk of cardiovascular problems in those that use dipping tobacco and chew tobacco. Most of us know that on its own nicotine is a fairly non-damaging substance and its really the TSNA's that give you cancer and ultimately end up deforming your face or killing you. Nicotine does have one profound damaging affect on the body. It constricts blood vessels. This doesn't really seem like a big problem at first, but we all know its true. Anyone who has smoked for extended periods of time knows that theres no way in hell that they could run a marathon or really run for an extended period of time and if you've ever tried to go on the treadmill with a fat chaw in (Just a personal story there haha) knows that their performance was pretty crappy.
It's actually pretty intuitive when it comes to the cardiovascular damage of nicotine. Constricted blood vessels make them easier to clot and thusly get a heart attack of stroke, constricted blood vessels don't allow your cells to become as quickly oxygenated which damages your ability to do physical work, and constricted blood vessels can lead to atherosclerosis which is when your arteries actually harden and are no longer malleable enough to support varying blood pressures in different situations. Constricted blood vessels really depend on the nicotine absorption into your blood stream. If you've read the massachusetts health department's report on snus and smokeless tobacco there are a variety of graphs (For some reason I can't seem to import the graph from the pdf). One of these shows the absorption rates of the different US smokeless brands in comparison with Ettan snus and smoking. Nicotine absorption is extremely fast in smoking as the nicotine is deposited right into your lungs where the red blood cells pick it up and deposit it throughout the body. The different brands of dip have a much lower absorption rate but are still considerable higher than that of snus. With snus, you get a constant nicotine absorption rate that the body can manage. The nicotine in snus is still there but it is given in lower doses over a longer period of time which does not damage your cardiovascular system nearly as much as any other way of getting nicotine (besides the patch; but who uses that crap anyways).
To sum it all up, snus is awesome. Snus allows you to get nicotine in the amount you need without constricting your blood vessels, arteries, and capillaries. There is still some effect as you still are ingesting nicotine, but it isn't in the amounts that could be considered dangerous. If you wanna have a healthy heart, skip the cheerios...buy a tin of Ettan and maybe, just maybe, work out.
So, onto the meat of this thread. I'm sure that most people on this forum are well educated on the health effects of snus so I'll skip the standard rigmarole of saying how great it is to be able to discreetly use a tobacco product that doesn't negatively effect your health. Most of us know that smoking is a major contributing factor to heart disease and cardiovascular damage. This is in part due to the fact that when the smoke is inhaled into the lungs the carbon monoxide bonds with hemoglobin (you know, the oxygen carrying molecule in red blood cells) and distributes poisonous carbon monoxide throughout all the cells in the body. However, there is still a substantial risk of cardiovascular problems in those that use dipping tobacco and chew tobacco. Most of us know that on its own nicotine is a fairly non-damaging substance and its really the TSNA's that give you cancer and ultimately end up deforming your face or killing you. Nicotine does have one profound damaging affect on the body. It constricts blood vessels. This doesn't really seem like a big problem at first, but we all know its true. Anyone who has smoked for extended periods of time knows that theres no way in hell that they could run a marathon or really run for an extended period of time and if you've ever tried to go on the treadmill with a fat chaw in (Just a personal story there haha) knows that their performance was pretty crappy.
It's actually pretty intuitive when it comes to the cardiovascular damage of nicotine. Constricted blood vessels make them easier to clot and thusly get a heart attack of stroke, constricted blood vessels don't allow your cells to become as quickly oxygenated which damages your ability to do physical work, and constricted blood vessels can lead to atherosclerosis which is when your arteries actually harden and are no longer malleable enough to support varying blood pressures in different situations. Constricted blood vessels really depend on the nicotine absorption into your blood stream. If you've read the massachusetts health department's report on snus and smokeless tobacco there are a variety of graphs (For some reason I can't seem to import the graph from the pdf). One of these shows the absorption rates of the different US smokeless brands in comparison with Ettan snus and smoking. Nicotine absorption is extremely fast in smoking as the nicotine is deposited right into your lungs where the red blood cells pick it up and deposit it throughout the body. The different brands of dip have a much lower absorption rate but are still considerable higher than that of snus. With snus, you get a constant nicotine absorption rate that the body can manage. The nicotine in snus is still there but it is given in lower doses over a longer period of time which does not damage your cardiovascular system nearly as much as any other way of getting nicotine (besides the patch; but who uses that crap anyways).
To sum it all up, snus is awesome. Snus allows you to get nicotine in the amount you need without constricting your blood vessels, arteries, and capillaries. There is still some effect as you still are ingesting nicotine, but it isn't in the amounts that could be considered dangerous. If you wanna have a healthy heart, skip the cheerios...buy a tin of Ettan and maybe, just maybe, work out.
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