Stats Douse His Love of Cigars

Let me start by clearing the air about one thing: I used to smoke cigars. My habit waned now and then, and was never more serious than one or two Arturo Fuentes or La Gloria Cubanas per week. But I still receive a monthly mail-order catalog from a cigar distributor and I actually own a humidor.

That handsome cherrywood box has been empty for months, though. It’s probably just a coincidence, but I think I smoked my final cigar in June, around the time the New England Journal of Medicine published a study showing that frequent cigar smokers have a 27% greater risk of heart disease than non-smokers. The same study found that stogie lovers, who are overwhelmingly male, are also more likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a condition that kills about 90,000 Americans each year.

For good measure, the authors added that smoking cigars raises your risk for cancers of the mouth and upper-respiratory tract. The study--conducted by researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland--was the most recent high-profile report aimed at snuffing out the cigar fad. Earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute had also issued warnings about the dangers of cigar smoking.

But are casual cigar smokers, as I considered myself, really at risk? After all, the men who were most likely to become sick in the New England Journal study were serious puff daddies, choking down at least five cigars a day. Meanwhile, Cigar Aficionado--the bible of today’s nouveau cigar hobbyist--claims that 90% of its readers smoke just one cigar or less a day.

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So should a guy be concerned if he sparks up a robusto after dinner now and then or likes to chomp on a big stinky at the weekly poker game? Unfortunately, no one knows. As the journal article makes clear and as the government report also acknowledges, scientists have not studied the health effects of smoking a few cigars a week.

According to the National Cancer Institute report, however, a common belief about cigars--that they’re harmless if you don’t inhale--is a myth. It’s true that non-inhalers have relatively low rates of lung cancer, in contrast to cigarette smokers and cigar lovers who do inhale. But it turns out that cigar smoke differs from cigarette fumes in an important way: It’s much more easily absorbed by tissue in the mouth and throat. That’s why even if you don’t inhale, regular cigar smoking still makes you 3 1/2 to 10 1/2 times more likely to develop cancer of the mouth, esophagus, pharynx or larynx.

And that’s not all. “Even a small amount of tobacco, even if you don’t inhale it, is going to increase the nicotine level in the blood,” says epidemiologist Carlos Iribarren, lead author of the journal study. That could spell trouble for your cardiovascular system, he says, because nicotine raises the heart rate and narrows blood vessels, which is a recipe for high blood pressure.

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Keep in mind too that simply sitting in a room with a smoldering cigar exposes you, and everyone around you, to second-hand smoke, which Iribarren points out has been linked to heart and lung disease. He concedes that the risks associated with smoking cigars appear to be cumulative--the more you light up, the greater the risk. But, Iribarren insists, “any tobacco use is not a good thing. You have to make your own choice.”

He might be heartened to know that the cigar craze appears to have peaked. A study last year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the number of cigar smokers in California doubled between 1990 and 1996. During that time, sales of hand-rolled, top-quality cigars, which ignited the craze, increased by as much as 68% a year, according to Norman Sharp, president of the Cigar Assn. of America. But sales were flat last year, Sharp says, and will increase no more than 5% this year.

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Iribarren asked if I thought that health warnings had caused sales to slow down. My hunch: The scary stats probably didn’t help, but it’s just as likely that a lot of trend-chasers simply got bored with cigars. Even Sharp concedes, “It was a faddish bandwagon a lot of people jumped on.”

Me? Even though scientists aren’t certain that savoring an occasional smoke can make you sick, I’ve decided to err on the side of caution. It seems to me that any habit that leaves your breath smelling like a coal mine the next morning is going to catch up with you eventually. I’m no scientist, but sometimes I think you just can’t ignore the smoke signals.

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Massachusetts freelance writer Timothy Gower is the author of “Staying at the Top of Your Game” (Avon Books, 1999). He can be reached at tgower@capecod.net. The Healthy Man runs the second Monday of the month.