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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

If you're wondering why this isn't a big deal in food - tobacco leaves have a huge surface area and generally are NOT washed before being dried. Nearly all food IS washed; but this is a good reminder that we live on a real planet, not a model ecosystem, you're eating trace amounts of all kinds of stuff.

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The sticky stuff on the tobacco leaves (where most of the Po210 is) is important to the product.

Also worth clarifying that the tobacco plant is radiophilic, meaning it proactively takes up radioactive elements into the body of the plant and tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity.

It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers

> It’s for this reason that Big Tobacco also quietly seeks out radioactive fertilizers

Wooow. All these years and I'm still learning new things about how criminally insane those greedy fucks are. Two in a day today.

Sure would be cool if any of our well funded institutions did something about it.

> tends to grow better in the presence of radioactivity.

Can you post a source for this? Curious.

It's complex, but the fertilizer itself is actually the source of the radioactive stuff. Tobacco has the odd characteristic of capturing that and the decay products are things like polonium

https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2008/08/29/radioactive-pol...

That doesn't say anything about Polonium being selectively taken up by the plant and used for growth. Just contamination on the sticky covering of the plants. Which doesn't make smoking tobacco good in any way, shape or form whatsoever, but it's not at all the same claim.

A quick search doesn't bring up any examples of radiophile organisms, in the sense of taking up radionuclides that are used for something. "Radiophile" bacteria exist, but that just means they are highly resistant to ionizing radiation. What are radioactive fertilizers? Potassium is radioactive to a small extent, but it doesn't seem like it's ever used for that property.

They're also grown with high phosphate fertilizers which produce a lot of decay products ending up in Po-210. THEN they aren't washed, and THEN they're dried under gas heaters which promote the formation of Tobacco-Specific Nitrosamines, which are incredibly carcinogenic.

One of the many reasons why, even though smoking anything is not great for your health, smoking tobacco is particularly harmful.

I don’t know if many other leaves that will give you mouth cancer from chewing them either.

depends on what you mean by "washed". rinsed by rain sometime before harvest; at the very least.

I rinsed my tobacco leaves after cutting / before drying, but I dunno how common that is in industrial farming. I've just grown a few plants as a hobbyist interest, advised by someone who helped grow tobacco 50yr ago, specifically for "plug" chewing tobacco. That's a bit different than the bulk of production even then.

Anyways my leaves were covered with a fuzz of (dead) gnats that needed washing off. My advisor says thats normal in moisture like mine.

"Washed" = soaped and waxed and repainted like commercial vegetables; then no. It all goes in a big grinder anyway.

Gotta any resources for garden tobacco you’d be willing to share please? It’s something I’m thinking about trying next spring.

This is pretty good: https://dengarden.com/gardening/Tobacco-Growing-and-Curing-a...

i got shockingly decent results from tormented plants in 2qt pots, shaded, and starved for nutrients. "brightleaf burley" almost. 6ft high at flowering.

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