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Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if drinking does the same?

I wonder if there is just about anything (other than water) that you can put in your body that wouldn't have some effect on the mutation rate of some particular cells in your body.

Plants, fruits, starchy vegetables..

Surely there are plenty of plants containing chemicals which if injested in some way could cause a change in cell mutations.

To confirm your point, last time I checked, vegans were still dying from cancer too.

You get DNA damage from a lot of different sources, from food to viruses to radiation to industrial chemicals to just plain replication errors.

I agree vegans probably still get cell damage from the food they eat, but that's not proof positive because they would still die from cancer even if they didn't.

Tobacco is a plant!

A wonderfully aromatic plant …

Cooking and eating it won't have the same effect (cancer wise) as smoking it.

Chewing tobacco does bad things.

I wonder if that's due to the other stuff typically added to chewing tobacco.

It'd be interesting if tobacco could be safer, but isn't, because the manufacturers don't want to incur the expense and anti-tobacco folks want to keep people from smoking at all, not make it safer (c.f. vaping, which is — I think — basically harmless and yet is banned as much as smoking is).

According to the American Cancer Society:

> The most harmful cancer-causing substances in smokeless tobacco are tobacco-specific nitrosamines.

> Cancers linked to the use of smokeless tobacco include:

  * Mouth, tongue, cheek, and gum cancer
  * Cancer in the esophagus
  * Pancreatic cancer

You can also get other kinds of mouth and tooth problems, and of course nicotine is still a definite health risk.

If there were a way to make tobacco healthy, I think the manufacturers would have spared no expense to do so, because the death of a customer prevents them from spending more money on what is sold.

(No idea about anti-vaping people, though.)

None of these are true for snus, and the American Cancer Society hasn't been the most trustworthy party on tobacco (although they should be.)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=swedish%20snus

The Lancet article is good, but there's a universal consensus.

It's based on roasting/burning it, the same reason why meat is cancer-causing. That's also why Swedish snus probably isn't cancer causing, because instead of being roasted, the tobacco is steam pasteurized.

I can't imagine that cigarettes would work with steamed leaves.

edit: And you'd have to vape the steamed leaf cigarettes, of course.

It might be that anything consumed in excess, over long periods of time, causes mutations in your body. Just a theory.

For that to be the case it should be accumulated in the body in the form of toxins or similar molecules, there's no other 'memory'.

So no, it does not work exactly like that. Some chemical compounds trigger mutations at a higher rate than others.

Of course, that seems to be exactly what is going on:

>"These considerations of mechanism suggest that at chronic doses close to the toxic dose, any chemical, whether synthetic or natural, and whether genotoxic or nongenotoxic, is a likely rodent and human carcinogen. Not all chemicals would be expected to be carcinogens at high doses; the MTD may not be reached (101) or the chemical may be toxic without causing cell killing or mitogenesis."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/

I would expect so.

Alcohol can cause inflammation, triggering various parts of the immune system to kick in. This could result in the release of free radicals from these immune cells, which promotes DNA mutations.

Alcohol (ethanol) is a Type 1 / Group A carcinogen.[1]

1. http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/g...

And surprisingly no mass deaths from cancer of Russians or Irish were detected, with both nations famous for alcohol abuse. Yes, alcohol is harmful, but like Russians joke, it only kills weak brain cells.

Maybe a lot of people die before they get cancer from it? Like organ failure (liver, kidney, heart) way before they develop cancer (symptoms)? Or get into accidents (car, freezing to death) etc. It is like people saying smoking can prevent Alzheimer as statistically people who smoke a lot have less instances of it. Because they die from that habit before the Alzheimer shows up.

Alcohol isn't very carcinogenic, but I think it's been estimated that it's the cause in a few percent of cancer cases.

At least here in the EU and especially this year for some reason, a lot of news has been doing the rounds that push research like [0] to the public. My parents doctor, since only a few months, now calls alcohol dangerous poison and something you should never use, like smoking. Although it's not new research, it seems more people are listening recently.

[0] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cance...

OTOH moderate intake of alcohol, despite the risks, also has positive effects on the cardiovascular system. Wine has antioxidants which are associated with longevity, beer is good for bone strength, and so on. While an alcoholic may have a higher chance of dying before cancer gets them due to organ failure and accidents, a glass-of-wine-a-day drinker might live longer with a higher quality of life with the increased cancer risks than they otherwise might have with their congenital heart disease or whatever. Cancer typically gets you when you're old, heart disease gets a lot of people in their 40s and 50s.

And while the first world doesn't benefit directly anymore, typical brewing and fermenting processes ensured a drink was sanitary due to lengthy boiling times or yeast out-competing other microbes. Alcohol and hops/flavorings provide antimicrobial effects, acetobacter competed and inhibited against other water-born bacterial and mold growth. Alcoholic beverages are an easy way to store and preserve calories in times of scarcity, etc. It's quite likely that those who chose low-alcohol beverages were saved from other water-born diseases and lived longer thanks to it.

Well, if they die close to their 90-ies, and with no cancer, its a decent lifespan. This is what I learned from my granddad, who was great chess player, famous school teacher, and volcanic smoker.

Your grandad got lucky. Getting lucky is nice, but it's probably not something you should count on.

Whats an inflammation, does internal organs get burned like our skins?

It causes swelling which cause more blood to be in that area which make the organs hotter. But I really doubt you could get any real burns from an inflammation.

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