Skip to main content

Emerging Deception

cut smoking



There is much in advertising today that consumers must be wary about. Advertising can be seriously deceptive. And certain advertising outfits will not care on the truth of the message if the pay-off is great. Smoking cessation products today can be as dangerous as advertised. These ads can have believable messages... but with a dangerous twist.

“THERE is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his short fiction, The Boscombe Valley Mystery. 

Apparently, only one of four emerging tobacco products now available in the American market had reached the Philippines. That product is popular as the “e-cigarette.” 

An E-cigarette is actually an electronic nicotine delivery system (Ends), a category of products that deliver a vapor of nicotine and flavoring on inhalation. Flavors include a variety of tobacco, fruit and food (e.g. chocolate) flavors. Companies market it as a smoking cessation device and an alternative to cessation. Of those who have tried it, 19.7 percent became regular users. Because it is the newest of the four, little research on their negative effects and efficacy exists. 

The other three emerging tobacco products include snus, waterpipe and dissolvable tobacco products (DTS). 

The snus is a smokeless tobacco product that does not require the user to spit. 

Companies marketed it as a reduced harm product in airports, and in no-smoking areas as a tobacco product to use without having to smoke. Its nicotine content makes dependence continue, and tempts former smokers try it once more. Robert McMillen and colleagues from the American Academy of Pediatrics noted in the Journal of Environmental and Public Health (May 2012) that snus attracts more daily smokers (12.9 percent) than nondaily smokers (4.1percent). 

Waterpipe originated in India in the 1700s, an instrument for inhaling charcoal tobacco smoke, cooled down by water. Marketed as safe alternative to cigarette smoking, people believe it safer than cigarette smoke. However, waterpipe produces concentrations of carbon monoxide, nicotine, tar and heavy metals at levels similar to, or higher than, cigarettes. It hooks nondaily smokers (26.0 percent) more than daily smokers (12.9 percent). 

DTS is also smokeless and spitless; a flavored form of finely milled tobacco that dissolves in the mouth. Like snus and Ends, companies market it as a dual product. 

It has special appeal to adolescents due to its attractive packaging, flavoring and dissolvable delivery system. Right now, its users stand at less than one percent among Americans. 

The deception in these products come from three fronts— [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 24 July 2013.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

The "Lungs" of Our Homes

As trees slowly disappear with growing urbanization, the Rooseveltian lungs are replaced with more dangerous electrical lungs at home, many of which can damage the genetic materials of the human lungs. FRANKLIN Roosevelt said: “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” In Cebu today, however, people may have given up “fresh strength” for the material conveniences of an urbanized province. Even the more far-flung towns in the province of Cebu have already shown signs of urbanization. And it will not be long when even forests will cease to be. Nonetheless, the “lungs” have been replaced with electric air fresheners, with all the varied approaches to freshen the air—at least in the cities and the suburbs. But four Japanese researchers—three from the Iwate University (Ueda, Morioka, Iwate) Department of Veterinary Medicine and one from the National Institute of Health Services (K...
2 comments
Read more

Dealing with TURP

As we age, a lot of things we easily can do when we were younger get harder to do as our bodily systems start to show problems in functioning. That's the case with TURP; and if you add the inevitable side effects of drugs used in treating it, you can only imaging how difficult old age can be.   A CERTAIN practice has been common in synthetic drug treatments (so common it may be considered a cliché).   You start taking a prescription for one health problem and you end up having a new one. Of course that is not true for all synthetic medications. But given lack of long-term studies in most pharmaceutical drugs today, who knows what’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years after taking a particular regimen.   In history, many drugs have been pulled out from shelves because they later turned out to be potential killers, if not already one.   The classic case is that of finasteride, a treatment used against certain complications that transurethral ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .)  This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...
Post a Comment
Read more