I’m a big fan of science. As XKCD likes to say – “Science. It Works, Bitches”.
Unfortunately, cigars are regularly being subjected to bad science and bad journalism.
A few months ago, Parade magazine ran an article called “The Dangers of Pipes and Cigars”. In the article, they reference a report done recently by Columbia University which, the article claims, showed that “smoking pipes or cigars doubled the odds of having an airflow obstruction.”
If this were indeed true, many of us would have to seriously reconsider our cigar habits.
The problem many cigar smokers have with this report, however, is that it is based on fluffy science.
As Smoke Magazine pointed out recently:
The Columbia study contained no new research, but an examination of a previous study that included just 56 individuals who smoked either cigars or pipes and did not smoke cigarettes.
Moreover, the study itself says “few participants smoked pipes or cigars…Effect estimates in this group were therefore relatively imprecise…” No kidding; what the survey actually showed was that among cigar-only smokers, the odds for decreased airflow to the lungs increased a trivial 1 percent when adjusted for age, race, sex, and height, and were 37 percent less than non-smokers when more carefully adjusted for 13 factors also including body mass, education, family history, and so on.
Additionally, the study report states “no U.S. studies have reported on the possible effects of cumulative pipe and cigar smoking on lung function.” This is wrong. In fact, the impact of cigar smoking was exhaustively reviewed by the National Cancer Institute in its monograph on cigars published in 1998.
Incidence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) was examined using the American Cancer Society’s massive CPS-I study, which included 15,072 cigar smokers. The result? For those who smoked an average of 1–2 cigars per day, there was no impact at all vs. non-smokers up through age 64, and for those who do not inhale, no impact through age 79!
Now consider that in the U.S. in 2009, smokers of all types of cigars averaged just 2.93 per week and smokers of handmade, premium cigars averaged a grand total of 1.59 per week!
But the CPS-I results are nowhere mentioned in the Columbia “study.”
As I’ve said on the blog before when I covered the CPS-I study, I take my health very seriously and so I’m always keeping an eye out on the latest science on cigars and health. It is unfortunate that a lot of the media coverage on the subject is pretty fluffy and either out-right biased or based on bad science.