One of my favorite movie lines of all time is Aaron Eckhart’s (who plays a lobbyist for the tobacco industry) line at the beginning of “Thank You For Smoking” where he introduces the doctor:
“This is the man they rely on—Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany; I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius—he could disprove gravity.”
Is there an established link between nicotine and (lung) cancer? I wasn't aware of one. Of course there is an established link between tobacco use and lung cancer, but that's an entirely different thing.
Of the studies that I've seen, nicotine actually is quite healthy and has many upsides: increased working memory and recall, preventive against dementia and parkinson's, and a mild mood stabilizer/anti-psychotic.
Nicotine certainly isn't anywhere near as harmful as other compounds in tobacco, but it is known to promote cell proliferation and angiogenesis, both of which contribute to the growth and spread of malignant cells.
Though there are far worse compounds in tobacco, nicotine is hardly 'healthy' - it entails a number of undesirable side effects. Long term use induces negative cardiovascular conditions (with rather noticeable acute effects on heart rate, blood pressure, blood lipid profile, and blood circulation in the extremities), directly contributing to atherosclerosis and dramatically increasing the risk of heart attack, strokes, and blood clots. It negatively impacts adolescent brain development, and contributes to a variety of harmful neonatal and womens' reproductive issues.
That isn't to say that it doesn't have value as a nootropic - I'm an occasional user exactly for that purpose. But spreading the false notion that nicotine is somehow a 'healthy' substance is at odds with medical science.
Nicotine is extremely addictive. This is what we're learning with vaping.
And seriously, if you've ever smoked 2-3 packs of cigarettes and get weird desires to have a cigarette, you've experienced nicotine's addicting qualities. It's so subtle at first that most people just don't realize they're addicted.
>> Is there an established link between nicotine and (lung) cancer?
Chemically, no. Epidemiologically, yes. In the real world, the more nicotine a person consumes, the greater their risk of lung cancer. We know that it isn't because of the nicotine per se, it is more likely all the other junk in cigarette smoke, but the lack of a direct chemical link doesn't mean there isn't a solid scientific link. (Vaping also involves lots of unknown junk, just different junk. Inhaling hot random chemicals probably isn't a good idea either way.)
With lots of medical "links" the specifics of the biology can remain mysterious while still being sound science. The link between aging and cancer isn't fully understood, but any doc anywhere would say that cancer risk increases with age. We don't need to completely understand the mechanism to recognize and react to the evidence.
The movie and book are both a lot of fun. I can't find a citation for it, but I do recall someone involved in the movie production complaining that the studio kept pressuring them to expand the role of Katie Holmes's character, to the detriment of the overall story.
How to Lie with Statistics is such a great book. It's amazing how relevant it is seeing it's over 60 years old. The same lies that were being told then are being told today with statistics.
Seconding the recommendation. One of the most impactful books you can read for yourself. It's such a short and easy read, too (few hours; you can finish it within a day even if you're slow).
That’s too negative. A lot of people can be convinced easily but there is a very loud minority that clings onto their “facts” and dominates the public conversation.
"There are many possible explanations for the sudden demise of Huff’s book.
The industry realized in 1968 that it had a credibility problem: the public
was unlikely to trust a book funded and promoted by the Tobacco Institute.
Perhaps the campaign was shelved after Tiderock closed up shop. Perhaps it
was too late—some tobacco regulations had already been passed, others were
inevitable, and new tactics were needed. Or perhaps the thought of legal trouble made them retract their offer to advertise the book, making Macmillan kill
the project.
But Macmillan was on the brink of signing a contract with Huff. Did
they have second thoughts, or was Huff told to kill the project? Or were the
Tiderock consultants correct in their assessment that “this mass of verbiage
needs drastic editing” and was unpublishable without serious revision?
The Documents Library offers no clues. Only documents produced or
received by the industry are included, so any correspondence between Huff
and Macmillan may not appear. Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at
Columbia University, reviewed the ethics of Huff’s involvement with the industry and suggested Huff could have intentionally killed the project to save
his own reputation, which would have been destroyed by his association with
tobacco.2 But just a few months before the book’s demise he had been fighting for a prestigious hardcover and better royalties.
Whatever the reasons, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics went unpublished, protecting its better-known sibling How to Lie with Statistics from guilt
by association."
Would the original book have commanded the same respect, if associated with another which would bascially be an example of what the first was meaning to expose?
It's really insidious, to publish a book that establishes you as an intelligent truth teller, standing up to what marketers and profiteers want you to believe, and then use that success to shill for the worst consumer facing industry of the century.
Honestly, arguing over whether or not GMOs or nuclear plants are safe is a bit like asking whether or not powered flight is safe. You could be talking about anything from a fighter jet locked in a dogfight to a child's RC toy - or, less abstractly, anything from a contentious and ethical research group/engineering team to a corporation/government trapped in short term thinking, violently ignoring negative signs (I can't think of a good way to describe the corporate mentality of "sad words bad, happy words good" but it is out there), and pushing off every externality they can.
>anything from a contentious and ethical research group/engineering team to a corporation/government trapped in short term thinking, violently ignoring negative signs
I find it amazing that people don't realize that the organic food industry also has deep pockets. How is it that a skeptic could be fail to be suspicious of Amazon?
Follow the money. GMO opponents usually have skin in the game.
I think it comes down to who you're suspicious of first. It's easy to be skeptical of GMOs when you equate them to Monsanto, because Fuck Monsanto.
It's a lot less easy to make the connection to, say, Amazon (or whoever else). And even if you do, still, fuck Monsanto.
Point is that when you're going off gut feeling (which you most likely are on some level unless you yourself are very knowledgeable on the topic), it's often going to come down to which pockets you hate the most. And, well, fuck Monsanto.
But just to be clear and as I was saying in my other post: you're right; both sides of the issue have deep pockets. The problem is it doesn't look that way at first glance.
Or perfectly unsafe. Unlike the somewhat-corporately-one-sided debates of climate change and tobacco, there's powerful interest groups on both sides of the nuclear/gmo debates.
I don't trust any corporation/government to build a safe reactor. They have failed repeatedly. The "this time is different", "modern designs have solved past problems" I don't buy, those claims have been made repeatedly too (and failed). I don't try the lowest bidder procurements, and I don't trust our understanding of risks (from terrorism to severe earthquakes to some idiot making a huge mistake).
I also don't think we have any solution to the thousands of years byproduct of nuclear waste. Especially since we've had several scandals of big companies belonging to various mafias just being paid to dispose it and dumping it to the sea. Or routinely passed through cities, despite protocol.
As for the claims of various "green power" schemes, I take those with large grains of salt too. Same for oil and coal (which at least has no big breakpoint like nuclear has, just a constant shitty pollution factor).
The absurdly low amount of both accidents and total fatalities in that entire page is honestly astounding. The reason it's chilling is that there's no comparative page for coal, or even non-nuclear sustainable power sources in general.
I doubt it. Finding problems in e.g. a small-sample, 22-month study is one thing, finding problems in studies that cover entire nations over several decades is quite another.
Darrell Huff's style in How to Lie with Smoking Statistics was to marshal an army of minor quibbles to apparently undermine the entire body of research: find a small flaw in one study, a minor error in another, and pretty soon you've made it appear like all the research is flawed. He didn't need to actually prove any one study wrong.
He also relied pretty heavily on arguments that correlation is not causation because smokers are genetically predisposed to smoke, and may also be predisposed to cancer and other maladies. He even quoted R.A. Fisher's argument that people smoke to quell irritation and annoyance, and having a chronic inflammation or cancer might just be the kind of irritation that makes you subconsciously want to smoke.
No number of enormous well-conducted observational studies would prevent Huff from making up scenarios for other types of confounding. Check out Chapter 12 of the book.
point to 1 such study on smoking, where they did actual measurements on an entire nation. i bet you they just sampled a subset and called it statistically sound. ;D
Can't. I heard that when I was a conscientous objector at the university hospital in Trondheim, Norway. One of the physicians there told me that they'd done statistics on all patients. Norway has a single-payer system, so that would really be all patients. But it's a while ago and I can't find email addresses for anyone whose name I still remember, so I can't.
all patients and 'nation' seems a bit overconfident of said doctor (even though i respect their work a lot!)... i guess his world IS the hospital patients but vice versa i think the world or a nation includes (a lot) more than its hospital patients.
So I looked, starting at fhi.no, and found quickly found several studies that use data based on either the Norwegian cancer registry, the cause-of-death registry or both.
These aren't samples. The cause of death registry includes all deaths and the cancer registry includes everyone who's been diagnosed with cancer, even people who received no treatment. This means that studies that investigate e.g. cancer caused by smoking and use these data sources are nationwide rather than sampled.
Of the article, or How to Lie with Smoking Statistics?
The article is sadly owned by the journal, which does allow authors to post pre-prints on their personal sites.
The book I'm not so sure about. I spent some time researching the copyright status back when I wrote the article, and the results were confusing. I don't think Huff ever registered copyright for How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, which was required at the time, but unpublished works were protected, and when the copyright system changed in the 70s unpublished works were given some statutory protections. The book only became public because of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which I haven't read but presumably sets some conditions on the documents it makes public.
In the end I decided it was safest to link to the Tobacco Documents Library, though I was very tempted to typeset a new edition of the book so we could enjoy an example of corporate propaganda.
“This is the man they rely on—Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany; I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius—he could disprove gravity.”