Light Cigarettes May Not Be Less Hazardous, Study Says
So-called light cigarettes may be as hazardous as normal ones, partly because smokers inadvertently cover the air holes around the filters designed to reduce cancer-causing agents, according to a study released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The centers estimated that two-thirds of U.S. smokers are unaware of the vents along the sides of a cigarette. The holes, designed to reduce tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide, are virtually impossible to see.
Michael Erickson, director of the centers’ office on smoking and health, said the new study is further evidence that low-tar cigarettes have “not provided the benefits people would expect.”
He said that even though 75% of the cigarettes now being smoked in this country are “low tar” and 98% have filters, “the relative risk of a smoker getting lung cancer has increased.”
One possible explanation for this surprising finding, Erickson said, is the way people smoke the “light” cigarettes. “What we’re finding is that smokers tend to cover those holes [with their fingers or lips]--either consciously or unconsciously--and that defeats the delivery of a low-tar dose. Most people don’t realize that,” Erickson said.
Lynn Kozlowski, professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University, who was the primary researcher on the study, said smokers of light cigarettes tend to take more and deeper puffs or even smoke more cigarettes in order to get the amount of nicotine that they were accustomed to with a regular cigarette.
Peggy Carter, a spokeswoman for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., said: “We don’t deny that some small percentage of smokers cover some of the vents, some of the time. But for the vast majority, those vent holes provide the dilution they were designed to provide.”
She said that when smokers change from regular to light cigarettes, they compensate in order to get more nicotine during the first few weeks, according to company studies. But then the smokers return to their normal patterns, she said.
Light cigarettes are defined as those that deliver no more than 15 milligrams of tar when tested on a machine.
U.S. cigarette companies are permitted to call such brands “light” because they have more air vents than regular brands. But Erickson said the mere presence of the vents is insufficient to assure that the smoker will get less tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide.
He contrasted “light” cigarettes and low-fat crackers. “You get less fat with a low-fat cracker no matter how you eat it, but that’s not the case with ‘light’ cigarettes,” Erickson said.
Kozlowski noted that people don’t ingest smoke the way the machine does, making the machine test results dubious.
The report comes on the heels of a report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute earlier this week, which found that light, low-tar and filter-tipped cigarettes contributed to increases in a type of lung cancer that occurs deep in the lung. The institute study attributed this to the fact that smokers of those cigarettes inhale more deeply to get a comparable nicotine dose.
