Swedish Snus: A Safer Tobacco

In Sweden today tobacco remains quite arguably a national pastime; roughly forty percent of Swedes still in fact maintain a nicotine habit. Given that elsewhere the smoker is typically imagined as some sort of shameful and pacing sidewalk Frankenstein, it is no surprise that Sweden's trend-bucking tends to confound. In most 1st world nations, America included, the nicotine-using population has withered incredibly under a mountain of death, exposé, and pitiless taxation. Yet Sweden's more numerous users are not what makes it unique.

More important are the statistics that seem to suggest an astounding contradiction: Tobacco use is extremely high in Sweden, but cancer rates in general are low and sloping downwards. Moreover, Sweden's lung cancer rates are among the absolute lowest in Europe . But experts, and I, say the trend is no mystery: the answer is "snus".

(Lung cancer stats by nation: http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/16/3/481)

In the past few decades a great many Swedes have abandoned cigarettes without abandoning nicotine, and they invariably accomplish this trick with the aid (or crutch) of snus: a smokeless, spit-less and discreet tobacco pouch that differs considerably from what Americans call "chewing tobacco".

It requires no actual chewing, nor "redneck" style saliva excretion. More importantly, it contains only a small fraction of the cancer causing substances present in traditional American chewing and smoking tobaccos.

In particular, Swedish snus distinguishes itself terms of nitrosamines, compounds which are often used as a sort of carcinogenic barometer. American, fire-cured chewing tobaccos have on average sixty-five percent more of these compounds than snus, and the more popular American brands typically deliver an even greater amount.

If, on first glance, these numbers do not impress, one must first realize that even old fashioned American oral tobacco its about half as dangerous as cigarette smoking when it comes to oral cancer, to say nothing of lung cancer(for the sources of these claims, scroll to the end of the article).