In Europe and North America, lung cancer has been regarded as one of the rarest forms of cancer in 1912. People have been getting lung cancers mainly from environmental pollutants as manufactured tobaccos haven't been commercialised and introduced to the public in both of the regions just yet
Hm... It's a bit unintuitive to me...
Back then, people were using charcoal and firewoods. There was a lot of smoke and yet not that high prevalence of lung cancer.
When I link that with the fact that consumption of a traditional Middle-Eastern smoking pipe (shisha) is very unhealthy due to charcoal, something feels like a bit inconsistent.
- Not my expertise, I'm just thinking out loud
I think it's more to the ingredient contained in the tobacco smoke compared to what's contained in the smoke produced by charcoal and firewoods. There are roughly 7000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, 250 are harmful and among those 250, 69 are considered carcinogenic.
If we are talking about hookah, then one of the factors at play is the pattern of inhalation compared to people who are simply light up their charcoal/firewoods for BBQ. According to CDC, people who smoke hookah are exposed to at least the same risk of developing cancer as smoking cigarettes though some articles might suggest the former to be much dangerous than the latter.
That is weird indeed. But probably it is going to be related to the amount of substance that is being smoked.
When we speak about smokers (at least according by the NHS), the average of cigarettes per day is 10.
Probably a bit high?
This topic grabbed my attention during my last visit to Serbia.
Traditionally, charcoal is used for bbq. Is it healthy... I'm not sure. The taste is certainly good:
Well, when meats are cooked at a high temperature, they can produce chemicals called heterocyclic amines (which is carcinogenic). Char mark on meats are considered an area which contains a high concentration of HCA; that's why some people wrap their meats in foils and flip them frequently. In Malaysia, if you have heard about a Southeast Asian dish called satay, you would know that char spot is often inevitable and it is usually served with vegetables with high anti-oxidant properties (cucumber and probably some onions for example). I'm not sure if cucumber can reduce the chance of getting cancer but......
I would say it may be strongly related to the amount of diagnoses? Today, we sometimes have the impression that some diseases/situation are more frequent, but in fact, they are simply better detected than a while ago.
I remember reading some statistics from the XIX century USA related to causes of death.
Many categories were hilarious, including hickups, being dead drunk and so on...
The most problematic was the category containing deaths related to abdomen. What was the exact cause - who knows. Liver, gut cancer, kidneys... Who knows
What the hell! Hilarious indeed! Dead from hickups? Really? Is this a thing?
We will never know. We only need to ba careful when doing the related comparisons (and this extents to many other fields).