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Research Suggests Tobacco Companies Add Weight Loss Drugs
smitty777 writes "According to an article from the European Journal of Public Health, the tobacco companies have been implicated in adding a number of drugs to tobacco products (PDF) to enhance their weight-reducing properties. Discovery News explains the neurological process for appetite suppression, which involves activating pro-opiomelanocortin cells in the hypothalamus."
Not only is it cool and fun, it will turn your fat ass into a prom queen!
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Who cares what tobacco companies do?
And no, I don't mean "who cares" as in I'm some cruel bastard who could care less what tobacco companies are doing to hook their users even more to their product. I mean who out there really cares what tobacco companies do anymore? Care to tell me exactly what anyone has done to step in and stop them from doing ANYTHING with their product?
Radioactive pesticides. Hundreds of chemicals that are far from "natural". Big Tobacco has become untouchable. Doesn't matter how many evil things they do to their product, so what's the point in publicizing it until someone out there actually starts giving a shit and does something about it. Unfortunately, those who SHOULD give a shit are far too busy getting paid off by tobacco lobbyists and raking in tax dollars. They look past the fact that other than a military grade weapons manufacturer, no other corporation on the planet is legally allowed to kill thousands of people every day by doing nothing more than using their product as intended.
Scary. That could make cigarettes unsafe!
More accurately, research finds that Nicotine is an appetite suppressant. And that tobacco companies have looked at adding other appetite suppressors in the past.
Because nicotine is cheaper by far and also more addictive.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
It's also who cares in that they aren't making exciting news anymore. It's really "They're evil, oh well. Oh look! Someone downloaded a copy of the Beatles! Arrest him!!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I know you're just joking, but here's a reply. On the short term, cancer adds to your body weight. But if you survive long enough, you'll lose weight. The reason is that cancer tends to soak up all the body's resources, starving your muscles and internal organs, causing the whole machine to work less efficiently.
Surely they would find the market for a reliable weight loss product to be as profitable as the market for tobacco.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
protean makes you feel full
So what great variety of things makes you feel full? <grin>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I suspect that if you really want to eat your cake and shed it as well, your best bet might be looking into the 'smoking cessation' market. Regular breathing of the products of incomplete combustion of organic materials is just a bad idea(even in non tobacco cases: 3rd world indoor wood/charcoal cooking causes a fuckload of pulmonary morbidity and mortality every year, for instance); but nicotine is available in all kinds of convenient delivery packages, and (while highly addictive) seems not to be particularly unhealthy by itself...
Believe it or not, I was a chain smoker from the age of 16 until I was 28. At one point I was smoking about 2 to 2.5 packs a day (no joke). I was always prone to bronchitis and asthma and after a really bad bout of bronchial infection I finally figured "I'll bounce back from this one, but in twenty or thirty years, I'll stop bouncing back and I'll have emphysema or worse." I quit cold turkey.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What do you suggest?
Perhaps a little background is in order. I am a Mormon. For religious reasons, my family has been telling their children (and anyone else that would listen) not to use tobacco since the mid 1800s. I personally served as a missionary in Chile where a fair portion of my time was spent trying to help people quit smoking. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes not. Apparently giving up smoking is very difficult. I never met a smoker that didn't want to quit, and yet few people actually are successful.
That's the problem. Smokers know that smoking is killing them, but they are addicted. We already have huge taxes on cigarettes. We control their sale to minors, and we control how they can be advertised. Heck, we even run advertisements extolling the many problems caused by smoking, and we force smokers to go to special designated areas to smoke. At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal. To be honest, I would not be surprised if that actually *increased* tobacco use. Marijuana manages to be quite popular while still being illegal.
Unfortunately, some people are just stupid. They don't see the harm in trying tobacco until it is too late and they are addicted. It is easy (and comfortable) to blame the politicians, but for the most part politicians have gone out of their way to cast a stigma on tobacco use. It is even easier to blame the tobacco industry, and just about anyone would be forced to admit that those guys are slimy. However, tobacco has a long history of use in the U.S. and I think that it would be counterproductive to try and curtail the rights of individuals in this regard. Our society has done everything it can to curtail the use of tobacco short of throwing people in prison for growing it or using it.
Yet, the government still pays out huge amounts of tax money as tobacco subsidy to grow the stuff every year, then heavily taxes the users. The government gets much more in taxes on each cigarette sold than the tobacco company gets as earnings. They really don't want to end smoking, and lose this huge revenue stream.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Here you go, uneducated cunt.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal.
Take this as anecdotal, but quite a while ago here in Massachusetts they set a aside a portion of the state cigarette tax to fund a series of anti-smoking PSAs.
If I recall, some were pretty graphic; i.e., pictures of smoke damaged lungs. Some were interviews with survivors of lung cancer and various cigarette related disorders. All were uniformly depressing.
I heard they had a significant negative impact on cigarette sales. That's only hearsay, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Then they stopped.
The nicest explanation I can think of is that enough people complained about being bombarded by a series of really depressing PSAs.
My cynical half suspects they stopped showing them because they negatively affected the state cigarette tax collection.
Unfortunately, some people are just stupid. They don't see the harm in trying tobacco until it is too late and they are addicted.
Get real. Everyone I know who smokes (including me) started when they were 14, 15, or 16 years old. At that age it's not about being stupid, it's about doing what your friends are doing because you don't want to look like a pussy or a killjoy or a doofus. Damn you, the first time I took a drag off a cigarette I knew it was stupid and I didn't want to be doing it at all, but the fear of being laughed at or pushed around outweighed the logic. I was not stupid, and I did know about the dangers -- the education system actually succeeds quite well in communicating those. What the education system utterly fails at is giving kids the skills and techniques they need to resist peer pressure. The advice seems to be "Don't hang out with those people." Okay... I won't hang out with... all my friends. Okay, yeah. I'll be sure to do that next time around.
Saying I'm just stupid just means you don't remember what childhood is like. I can't think of a single person who smokes who started when they turned legal age to do so. By that time you've pretty much got enough maturity to resist the people trying to push you into it. You think there are people out there who don't understand that the shit is deadly? Seriously?
Finally, about 15 years later I'm finally having some success quitting by using electronic cigarettes -- still getting the nicotine, which isn't exactly like drinking the elixir of life, but I'm not inhaling tar, radioactive particles, ammonia, carbon monoxide and a bunch of other shit. I tried patches and gum before, it never worked because it didn't provide the rest of the "smoking experience," which includes the motion of hand to mouth, the puffing, the exhaling and watching the smoke. I tried the e-cig and bam, immediately stopped the tobacco cigarettes and haven't been tempted to go back. All that's left now is to dial down the nicotine dose, then I can start to deal with the psychological part of it. And if I slip up there, I'll just end up on the e-cig again. Never again will I go back to tobacco cigarettes.
Unfortunate to hear about your neighbor, but there are a lot of substances available to people that can do harm in quantity. Can we jail food producers? Alcohol producers? Can't we hurt or kill ourselves with almost anything, given enough of it?
At some point, don't we have to take responsibility for what we choose to consume? It's not like a lot of these products don't come covered in warnings anymore.
My family got paid a huge amount (by the government) to sell the rights to our tobacco base. Since it's sold, no one else can lease or use the base. In case anyone isn't aware of what tobacco base is, you can only grow tobacco on a small percentage of your farmable land. If you don't wish to grow any, you can lease your base to another farmer. They grow it on their own land but pay you a percentage for allowing them the use of your base. They lease a lot of base so they can have a sizable crop.
Even we we did grow tobacco, we never got any subsidies, at least directly. It was damn profitable on its own.
Gone!
Holy crap, cereal full of shape-shifters? Kellogg's doesn't make that, do they? And you EAT that?
What really blows my mind is that there is no requirement to list ingredients on tobacco products. Labels are required on food items so why not on cigarets? One could argue that it is even more relevant since anything you smoke goes directly into your blood stream as opposed to the multiple processing stages food takes when you ingest it. This is unbelievable and the only reason I can think of is strong lobbyism by tobacco companies.
It was my understanding that those PSA's (which were in many states) were funded out of the original big tobacco lawsuit settlement the states reached with the companies a decade or so ago. Eventually the settlement money ran out. I'm not sure that in most states the PSA's were ever funded with the taxes (though yours might have been)...
More info on it Here... Check out the Public Education Fund which apparently only lasted 3 years (2000-2003).
Come play Moral Decay!
your pack a day habit will always be MUCH worse then any of the things you listed. FOR YOU. hey, my mother said it true; you can't die with dignity if you can't breathe!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Except most things have some kind of benefit. Even alcohol has health benefits in certain quantities. You can also enjoy alcohol responsibly. There is no responsible way to enjoy cigarettes.
as well as being the safest addictive substance known to man.
Caffeine. And take your sock puppet with you on the way out.
Personally, I find that shitting the non-smokers is one of the major benefits of smoking. I'd quit if I knew I wouldn't become one of you.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
My family got paid a huge amount (by the government) to sell the rights to our tobacco base... They lease a lot of base so they can have a sizable crop.
So, all your base are belong to us, now?
This is pretty much the core of the issue. The governments in question don't want to cut into their own tax base by banning tobacco, or effectively convincing people not to use the product.
And the tobacco lawsuits weren't about stopping those evil tobacco companies either. They were about extorting billions more in revenues from the tobacco companies, since it was more popular with the voters to extort from big businesses rather than raise taxes on your citizens....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yes, there are health risks, and it's my right to decide if I chose to accept those risks or not, not yours.
And it's our right to call you out on being stupid, and to ask you to get those reeking sticks away from us. (It's unbelievable how much nicer it is going out to bars now that smoking in them has been banned in my state.)
Also, good for you for rationalizing how "fun" smoking is; the joke is on you though, because once you've built up tolerance to nicotine, smoking just brings you back to the baseline "stimulated" level that the rest of us enjoy without it. I also really enjoy the "experience" of a fountain soda, but I realize that it's mainly from satisfying a caffeine/sugar addiction, not the soda itself, and I don't fool myself into believing that it's some "fun" thing.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
How different one plant is treated just because a certain group of wealthy white men got here centuries ago and made a bundle selling it.
Those same wealthy white men made a fortune selling hemp as well. Hemp rope was an integral part of the sea trade networks prior to the end of the sail era.
While there's some racism involved in prohibition of marijuana, it's worth noting that the US even went as far as to ban all alcoholic beverages for a period of time, which as I understand it, is one of the main drugs of choice for rich, white men and has remained so for millennia.
So maybe things happen for reasons other than wealthy, white people centuries ago.
I would argue that drugs can be used to good effect or bad effect. The same drug. It often depends on dose.
Take an aspirin for a headache? Sure. Take a dozen? Not so much, as it were.
Just how harmful a drug tends to be is still relevant:
drug danger.
On the other hand, we have historical precedents for what happens when drugs like cocaine (or worse heroine) are legalized. That was not a good idea.
It may not be a good idea but is it a worse idea than:
a) Spending billions on enforcement which only stops 1% of the drugs reaching the streets.
b) Watching billions of dollars go overseas to be stacked in huge mansions in Columbia.
c) Making mafia bosses very rich/powerful.
d) Funding gang warfare.
e) Funding all the police/medical care which goes hand in hand with (d)
f) Having to build mega prisons because you're locking up so many people for victimless crimes.
No sig today...
... But with smoking, there is no analogue that is healthier.
I don't smoke, never have, and don't like being around smokers much. But if I was going to smoke, it'd be with organic tobacco in a pipe.
If you search for "radioactive tobacco", you can read about how the US Federal Government took away the tobacco industry's fertilizer supply in WWII, to make munitions. The tobacco industry switched to fertilizing their crops with rock phosphate. Tobacco concentrates radioactive elements in the leaves, and rock phosphate happens to have a lot of radioactive elements.
I think organic tobacco farmers fertilize using traditional methods - manure & the like.
The other problem with cigarettes are the filters. When used, they release microscopic filaments into the lungs.
I'm usually the type who will go out & find supporting links, but I have some other things to attend to this evening. If you're interested they're rather easy to find.
Furthermore, many people know a non-smoker who came down with lung or throat or mouth cancer. WTF? The problem is that humans had been using butter, tallow and lard (animal fats) for a thousand generations. Then the seed oil industry, threatened with extinction because their primary customer (paint industry) switched to petroleum in the 1950's, waged a propaganda campaign against the fats humans have consumed forever. Somehow "saturated" fats became a heart-attack-on-a-plate, when those "paint oils" are actually much more hazardous to human health.
Butter, which is has a large proportion of stable "saturated" fat, semi-stable monounsaturated fat, and a wee-little bit of unstable polyunsaturated fat, is much less cancer-provoking than "goes rancid as soon as it is made" corn oil or soybean oil or rapeseed oil or linseed oil or...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Get real. Everyone I know who smokes (including me) started when they were 14, 15, or 16 years old. At that age it's not about being stupid, it's about doing what your friends are doing because you don't want to look like a pussy or a killjoy or a doofus. Damn you, the first time I took a drag off a cigarette I knew it was stupid and I didn't want to be doing it at all, but the fear of being laughed at or pushed around outweighed the logic. I was not stupid, and I did know about the dangers
Agreed - except for the knowing the dangers - I didn't know it was addictive or deadly (40 years ago). And I was stupid. It made me sick - yet, like every other (juvenile) smoker I persevered due to peer group pressure. When had my first cigarettes I was in primary school - the only teacher who did not smoke was the drama teacher. Every single role model I had - smoked. Good children played sport - sponsored by tobacco. Rebellious children admired movie and rock stars - who all smoked. The local shops sold single cigarettes. The leaders of industry and politics - all smoked. It was pretty pervasive marketing. Paid a lot of mortgages.
millions of acres of prime farm land is being used to grow a poisonous weed that people burn. Also that farm land is ruined for decades (due to nicotine contamination plus the heavy toll growing tobacco takes on soil). Smokers drive up the cost of food for me. Plus, smart doctors are busy researching a type of cancer that doesn't need to exists (smoking induced lung cancer), when they could be researching things I (a non-smoker) are likely to die of.
Smokers actions don't take place in a vacuum.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Bars, restaurants, everywhere is much nicer to visit now that smoking is banned in those places. I remember the bad old days when there was a smoking and non-smoking section. With very few exceptions where the non-smoking section was airtight-sealed, it was still pretty bad even in the non-smoking section. Now if they could just do something about the entrances to buildings. Make all the smokers go 20 meters off to the side or something so we don't have to pass through a cloud of disgusting cloying smoke.
Cigarette smoke is just awful. I've had smoke from camp fires blow into my face plenty of times when it's thick and choking and makes your eyes water. It's a lot stronger than a few people standing around smoking. But I vastly prefer that smoke to the vile stuff that issues out of cigarettes. A few minutes of exposure to it makes you feel unclean all day.
See here's the thing: last I heard this was SUPPOSED to be America, a land where unlike the socialist and communist states one was SUPPOSED to have a lovely combination of FREE CHOICE along with PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY...remember that? Tell you what sparky, as a smoker I will be HAPPY to sign an iron clad contract that says that if I get cancer the ONLY thing I will be given is quite cheap morphine so I don't suffer, in return you remove ANY AND ALL TAXES from the product I CHOOSE to use, okay?
But that will NEVER EVER happen, why? Because it wouldn't let state and federal politicians spend like drunken sailors while at the same time telling what you can and can't do. Nanny state types just LOVE that shit. Did you know they are talking now about a sugar and a fat tax? Yep can't let that peasant decide whether or not he wants a coke or a burger now can we? Meanwhile the things they like, like say the imported vodka for their martini, is taxed much lower than cigarettes, huh isn't that funny. You'd almost think alcohol doesn't splatter hundreds of thousands of innocents all over our roads or something.
Take a look sometime at what the tobacco settlement was supposed to be used for and what it actually was sometime, it'll open your eyes. In my state they got pissed that the state next to us was bragging about how nice their trauma center was so we had to top them in a "our trauma is bigger than yours" penis waving. Didn't matter that the trauma center we had worked just fine for our smaller state, it wasn't like it was their money, right? WAKE UP! The smokers are the canaries in the coal mines. The nany staters don't want you to have ANY control of your life! They will add fat, sugar, hell I wouldn't be surprised if they end up taxing the hell out of white bread so you can only have wheat on your sandwich. Nothing gives those in control a bigger stiffie than controlling the lives of the peasants while having more money to blow on bridges to nowhere and payout to their owners...err...I mean "campaign donors".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Two months smoke free after 20 years of smoking. Quit cold turkey and no desire to start again. Woke up the morning I quit and like a switch threw out what I had left and that was it.
"Keep at least 3-6 full bottles of hard alcohol on hand, a 2 week resignation notice,..." - Poetmatt
rock phosphate happens to have a lot of radioactive elements.
I think organic tobacco farmers fertilize using traditional methods - manure & the like.
You only think that because the USDA took over the word "organic" and made it mean fuck-all. Guess what? Rock Phosphate can be USDA certified organic. Remember, Organic tobacco DOES NOT mean safer tobacco. They tell you right on the can.
Once upon a time "organic" farming meant basically what "permacultural" means today, except a little less specific and strict. Today it means jack diddly shit, unless it's a reputable third party certification. A USDA organic seal will actually push me towards another product if I can find one with something more reputable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"