Katie Lynch sucked in smoke from a long, narrow mouthpiece with pursed lips as if sipping from a straw. Her mother, Kathy Lynch, sat to her right with brow furrowed and arms crossed, watching as Katie cocked her head back, narrowed her eyes and gently puffed a cloud into the air.

Katie, 18, had convinced her mom to come to Jerusalem Café in Westport on a Thursday evening, not to eat Mediterranean food, but to head upstairs to the hookah bar. In the dim red light, people — many of them around Katie’s age — lean back in chairs and booths while they smoke tobacco from hookahs, traditional Middle Eastern water pipes.

Young people in big cities and college towns, including Lawrence and Warrensburg, Mo., are flocking in increasing numbers to hookah bars and lounges. Medical researchers said hookah use in the United States rose dramatically this decade, even as cigarette smoking rates steadily fell, city after city banned indoor smoking, and regulations on the tobacco industry continued to tighten.

Although hookah bar owners said the smoke people inhaled was less dangerous and less addictive than cigarettes, doctors point to research that indicates that may not be the case. One researcher called the spreading hookah use an “epidemic.”

Jerusalem Café added a hookah bar this summer at its 39th Street location. Sinbad’s Café and Hookah Lounge opened recently on Broadway Street near Westport, giving the city its first hookah business not connected to a restaurant. Along with Jerusalem Café on Westport Road, where the hookah bar dates to 2002, and Aladdin Café on 39th Street, Kansas City has at least four hookah businesses.

Hookah bars can operate legally under the smoking ordinance passed last year because of an exception for retail tobacco shops, but they cannot sell food or liquor, and at least 80 percent of their revenue must come from tobacco sales.

Jerusalem Café on Westport Road and Aladdin Café both had to separate their hookah bars from their restaurants to keep them legal. Jerusalem Café’s is upstairs, and Aladdin Café’s is outside.

But the restaurants’ owners said the ordinance had done little to slow their business, especially among college-age people too young to go to bars.

“Between the ages 18 and 21, there’s nothing to do,” said Farid Azzeh, owner of Jerusalem Café. “And this is something.”

A recent import

Hookahs are ubiquitous across the Middle East, where they’re a tradition that dates back centuries, said Mazen Iskandrani, owner of Aladdin Café.

“You can see, between a hookah bar and a hookah bar, another hookah bar,” said Iskandrani, who is from Jordan.

Sami Mac, owner of the new hookah bar Sinbad’s, said he was taking inspiration from cafés where he had played as a musician in Palestine.

Hookahs started spreading across the United States in the late 1990s after Middle Eastern tobacco companies began mass-producing hookah tobacco mixtures with sweet, often fruity flavors, said Kimber Richter, an associate professor of preventive medicine and public health at the University of Kansas.

Visit any of the hookah bars in Kansas City, and you’ll find dozens of flavors, ranging from the familiar and fruity (strawberry or apple) to the more exotic (jasmine or rose).

Mured Alreshiq, who manages Jerusalem Café’s Westport hookah bar, demonstrated how the water pipe works.

The tobacco mixture, usually shipped from Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East, contains tobacco mixed with flavored molasses. This mixture goes in a metal bowl, wrapped in punctured aluminum foil, at the top of a vase-shaped pipe, about 3 feet tall. On top of the foil go a few small charcoals. Smoke travels down through a tube into a pool of water at the bottom of the pipe. When smokers inhale through a hose, attached just above the water, the water gurgles and the smoke comes out, filtered and cooled by the water.

Each of the Kansas City businesses sells a hookah session for two or three people for $10 to $12, with an additional fee for more smokers. A session can last as long as an hour.

A social activity

It’s no mistake that the hookah bars offer the sessions to groups. Smokers said a hookah was something to enjoy with others, not alone. This is the biggest part of its appeal, they said — that and the fruity flavors.

“You can bring your girlfriend here, but you wouldn’t bring your girlfriend to go smoke a pack of cigarettes,” said 18-year-old Carter Harrington of Platte City, who smoked a hookah with two friends recently at Aladdin Café. Harrington said he had never smoked cigarettes.

Katie Lynch of Lee’s Summit said she didn’t smoke cigarettes, and neither did most of the people she knew who smoked hookah.

“People who wouldn’t touch anything else, who wouldn’t touch a cigarette, come here,” Lynch said.

The water in a hookah pipe cools the smoke and makes it less harsh than cigarette smoke, said Wazim Maziak, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Memphis who researches water pipe smoking. This has led to a perception of hookah smoking as safer and more “mellow” than other forms of tobacco smoking, he said.

Alreshiq said about 40 percent of Jerusalem Café’s hookah customers didn’t smoke any other forms of tobacco. He also said most customers were under 25.

Health debate

Ask a hookah bar owner and a doctor about the health risks, and you may wonder if they’re talking about the same thing.

Hookah bar owners said hookahs posed fewer health risks than cigarettes, pointing to numbers on hookah tobacco boxes that said the mixture contains no tar and only 0.05 percent nicotine.

Maziak said research on the health effects of hookah smoking was lacking. But he said evidence abounded that it was far from harmless and could pose many of the same risks as cigarette smoking.

In journal articles, Maziak has called hookah smoking an “epidemic.”

He said studies had suggested that hookah smoke could affect people’s lungs and cardiovascular systems in similar ways to cigarettes and that it could lead to birth problems for pregnant women.

Maziak said he worried that policymakers were treating hookah smoking the same way they treated cigarette smoking 40 or 50 years ago — waiting too long to warn people that it’s probably bad for them.

“We’re waiting for things to become bad,” he said.

Because a hookah produces smoke using charcoal, the smoke contains some carcinogens that come from the charcoal, not the tobacco, he said. The tobacco, in fact, does not actually burn. This could be the reason for studies on the chemistry of hookah smoke that have revealed high levels of tar, even if hookah tobacco contains no tar, as it is advertised.

Hookah smokers Lynch and Harrington both mentioned the “buzz” they felt when they smoked — a lightheaded, relaxed feeling. Maziak said this might actually be the result of carbon monoxide in the smoke.

Smoking pot can cause as much damage to cells and DNA as tobacco smoke, according to a group of Canadian researchers who are challenging the belief that marijuana is less harmful than cigarettes. Rebecca Maertens, a researcher from Health Canada and co-author of the study, says many Canadians believe marijuana smoke is less toxic, and causes less damage than tobacco because pot is “natural.”

Despite several experiments that show marijuana use to have adverse health effects, the prevalence of marijuana use in Canada has increased over the past decade, while the incidence of tobacco use has decreased.

Nearly one quarter of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 reported using marijuana in the previous 12 months according to 2006 Statistics Canada report — over 14 per cent of those said they used the drug on a daily basis. The team behind this new study suggested that a lack of understanding about the dangers of marijuana plays a part in why youth are so cavalier about smoking it. Neither marijuana nor the main psychoactive component of the plant, THC, has been shown to cause cancer. There are, however, substances in marijuana that can be very harmful to a person, according to previous studies on the drug.

Negative health effects induced by smoking marijuana, such as chronic bronchitis, have been well documented, as have other negative health effects. A 2007 study from New Zealand, for example, examined the effects of cannabis on lung capacity. The results suggested that marijuana smoke compromised lung efficiency between 2.5 and five times more than tobacco smoke. Despite some knowledge surrounding marijuana’s adverse effects on human lungs, researchers still have little knowledge about the plant’s potential to cause lung cancer, Maertens said.

This is due in part to the difficulty researchers have had in identifying and following subjects who have smoked only marijuana, she said. In this study, scientists exposed animal cells and bacteria separately to smoke from marijuana and tobacco plants. Although marijuana smoke caused significantly more damage to cells and DNA than tobacco, according to the researchers, only tobacco smoke caused chromosome damage. But marijuana advocate Marc Emery dismissed the study when contacted Wednesday night. “Where is the proof of this DNA damage to Canadians?

Are there mutations in the 15 million Canadians who have smoked marijuana in the last 45 years?” said publisher of Cannabis Culture Magazine in an e-mail to Canwest News Service. “Cannabis consumption completely prevents Alzheimer’s disease, cleans the lungs by shrinking tumours and breaks down necrotic cells and clears them out of the lungs. Millions of Canadians use cannabis for relief of symptoms of multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, chemotherapy, opiate medications, and numerous other ailments . . . This study is false and is in fact blatant lies once again from the least trustworthy source of health information in Canada — the lackeys at Health Canada.” Emery is on a cross-Canada farewell tour before he surrenders to U.S. narcotics officials to face charges in that country.

© Ottawacitizen

A groundbreaking tobacco case flamed out last week when a jury awarded the children of a now-deceased smoker $1.5 million — $20.5 million less than a previous verdict overturned on appeal.

“The jury apparently felt that R.J. Reynolds didn’t need to be deterred,” said a disappointed Greg Leyh, an attorney for the children.

In February 2005, a Jackson County jury awarded the family of Barbara Smith $2 million in compensatory damages (which was later reduced to $500,000 because Smith was determined to be 75 percent at fault) and $20 million in punitive damages — the largest punitive award ever in a Missouri smoking case.

The verdict was against Brown & Williamson, which was later acquired by Reynolds. Brown & Williamson made Kool cigarettes, which Smith smoked for nearly 50 years. She died of a heart attack in May 2000 at the age of 73.

Brown & Williamson appealed the verdict, and the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City two years ago ordered the case retried on the issue of punitive damages only. The court ruled that evidence of Brown & Williamson’s wrongful conduct was sufficient to submit to a jury.

In a lengthy opinion written by then-Judge Robert Ulrich, the court found that Brown & Williamson “had an active process of creating controversy regarding the health risks of smoking and planned to dispute every surgeon general’s report, regardless of what it was based upon.”

But because the basis for the jury’s award of punitive damages was unclear, the court sent the matter back for a new trial on that issue alone.

The case finally went to trial again late last month before the same judge, Marco Roldan, as the earlier trial. The jury was limited to deciding whether Brown & Williamson sold Kool cigarettes “with complete indifference” to or “conscious disregard” of the safety of its customers.

Independence attorney Ken McClain, the Smith family’s lead trial lawyer, told the jury that Brown & Williamson had designed cigarettes to make them addictive.

The company’s defense counsel, Jeff Furr of King & Spalding in Atlanta, countered that Brown & Williamson had sought to make its products less dangerous and didn’t know Kools were defective.

The jury two weeks ago found that Brown & Williamson knowingly sold a dangerous and defective product. It then proceeded to a second phase to determine punitive damages.

McClain asked jurors to award $110 million “to send a message.” That amount represented about a quarter of the $442 million in dividends Brown & Williamson received from its parent company last year and about the same amount Reynolds’ top five executives made in the last five years.

The jury, however, came back with $1.5 million, a fraction of what McClain sought. Leyh said that he spoke to two of the jurors after the trial and got the sense “that since Brown & Williamson doesn’t make cigarettes anymore, they didn’t feel there was a need to deter them.”

Both sides said they plan to appeal.

NEW YORK – While many countries have banned terms like “light” and “low-tar” from cigarette packs, other aspects of the products’ packaging may also be misleading consumers, a new study suggests.

Studies have shown that long-used terms like “light,” “mild” and “low- tar” confuse many consumers into thinking that so-described cigarettes carry lower health risks. Dozens of countries have now banned tobacco companies from using the terms on cigarette packs.

But in the new study, Canadian researchers found that other packaging details — words like “smooth” and “silver,” and even the color of the pack — influence consumers’ perceptions of a brand’s health risks.

The findings suggest that current regulations are not going far enough to remove misleading elements from cigarette packs, the researchers report in the Journal of Public Health.

One remedy would be to require “plain packaging,” free of logos and other brand imagery, write David Hammond and Carla Parkinson of the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

“Plain-packaging regulations came very close to being implemented in Canada in the early 1990s, and they are receiving serious consideration in several other countries at the moment,” Hammond noted in an email correspondence to Reuters Health.

The tobacco industry is opposed to such measures, which is not surprising, Hammond noted, since packaging is a key marketing tool, particularly in countries where other forms of tobacco advertising are restricted.

And a cigarette pack’s appearance does seem to influence many consumers’ perceptions, Hammond and Parkinson found.

For their study, the researchers had 312 smokers and 291 non-smokers look at cigarette packs that had been specifically designed for the study. Participants viewed the packs in pairs, with the two products differing in one element of package design.

Overall, the study found, 80 percent of participants thought that the product labeled “smooth” carried fewer health risks than the one labeled “regular.” Similarly, when they viewed products labeled as either “silver” or “full-flavored,” 73 percent thought the “silver”

product was less hazardous.

Even numbers included as part of the brand-name influenced perceptions. Eighty-four percent of participants thought the product that included a “6″ in the name was less risky than another product labeled with a “10.”

Color also mattered. More than three-quarters of the men and women thought that the light-blue pack they viewed carried fewer risks than its dark-blue counterpart.

While the tobacco industry opposes the notion of plain packaging, Hammond said he is “confident” it will be a reality in the next five years — likely with one country setting the precedent, and others quickly following suit.

Ultimately, Hammond said, the public may look back at today’s cigarette packaging in the same way they now view the practice of having smoking sections on airplanes.

“People will wonder how such a lethal product was ever allowed to be sold in packages with pictures of flowers and pretty coloring that appeal to young people and provide false reassurance to consumers about the risks of smoking,” he explained.


SOURCE: Journal of Public Health, online July 27, 2009.

The Department of Health and the Center for Tobacco Control Research has found that both, cigarettes and shisha, harmful.
If the findings of the new research are anything to go by, smoking shisha produced carbon monoxide levels at least four to five times higher than what a cigarette produces.

It is an established fact that elevated levels of carbon monoxide can result in brain damage and unconsciousness.

Since shisha entails using a pipe which could be shared at times with other users, the risk of passing infections gets heightened. Likewise, the risk of getting TB and herpes also increase.

Eye opener
The findings should make those people who regard shisha “as not even smoking” sit back and think twice before going in for the next puff.

The misconception is so deep rooted that many people find it perfectly acceptable to visit “shisha evenings” as they consider it a safer substitute to smoking cigarettes.

“If my mum sees me smoking shisha, she isn’t going to take it as seriously as if I was smoking cigarettes,” said a British Pakistani man.

The alarming findings
Dr. Hilary Wareing, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research, was shocked at the findings of the study and said, “Our mouths opened at the level of harm – none of the tests we did showed anything other than shisha is hazardous to health.”

Wareing said of the findings, “We found one session of smoking shisha – that’s 10 milligrams for 30 minutes – gave carbon monoxide levels that were at the lowest four and five times as high as having a cigarette. But at the worst, shisha was 400 to 450 times more dangerous than having a cigarette.”

Shisha or Hookah
Shisha, also known as Hookah, is a single or multi-stemmed, invariably glass-based water pipe for smoking. The shisha uses fruit-scented tobacco burnt with the help of coal, passed through an ornate water vessel and inhaled through a hose. Users often use the shisha to inhale herbal fruits and tobacco.

Having its origin in India, the hookah is becoming very popular in the Middle East, USA, UK and Canada. As on date, Egypt, Iran and Turkey are leading the way when it comes to the best quality and most extravagant hookah pipes.


© Themedguru

I saw a TV commercial recently that touted the health benefits of high fructose corn syrup. At first, I thought it might be a skit from “Saturday Night Live.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

There are several versions of the commercial, and they all inform us that high fructose corn syrup is made from corn – a healthy vegetable; it has the same number of calories as sugar and honey; and it’s perfectly fine in moderation.

Sounds reasonable. So why is high fructose corn syrup high on the list of dietary villains that help make us fat and contribute to the host of chronic diseases that cause us to live sicker and die quicker than virtually every other advanced industrialized nation? As is the case with most health issues, sound-bite commercials mask the complexities of the matter and often are misleading. Let’s take a look.
Simple sugars

Simple sugars are the building blocks of all carbohydrates, and the two main ones are glucose and fructose. When you bond these two together, you end up with sucrose, or table sugar. Fructose often is referred to as fruit sugar. It’s sweeter than glucose, and when you ingest it, it goes to the liver, where it is either burned for energy or converted to glucose and released into the bloodstream.

In the past in the U.S., we used table sugar to sweeten things. But eventually, sugar became too expensive because we had to import it, and alternatives were sought. Corn is cheap, and a sweetener can be made by milling the corn to produce cornstarch, which is then processed down to a syrup that is almost entirely glucose. Then the glucose is processed further and converted to fructose, which is sweeter. High fructose corn syrup comes in several forms, but most are approximately half fructose and half glucose, which is similar to the composition of sucrose (table sugar).

Because it’s cheaper, high fructose corn syrup began showing up everywhere – soft drinks, candies, crackers, cereals, salad dressings, ketchup, juices, bread and other baked goods, etc. This was not seen as a problem because high fructose corn syrup was merely serving as a cheaper alternative for sugar.
The problem

High fructose corn syrup was introduced approximately 30 years ago. Since then, consumption has increased progressively, and today we are the world’s largest consumer. But consuming too much may be more problematic than it sounds.

There is some scientific evidence that high fructose corn syrup may not be recognized by the body in the same way as naturally occurring sugars found in fruit and cane sugar. Natural sugars help trigger a physiologic response that tells us when we’ve consumed too much, which stops us from consuming more. If high fructose corn syrup doesn’t trigger this reaction, we would consume more calories than we might if what we were eating was flavored naturally. This would result in increased body fat.

In fairness, there is controversy surrounding high fructose corn syrup and obesity. Obesity rates in the U.S. and especially among children have increased dramatically over the past three decades since high fructose corn syrup was introduced as a sweetener. Those who support high fructose corn syrup and who profit from its sales claim this is just a coincidence, and they demand proof that high fructose corn syrup is causing the obesity.

Sound familiar? For years, the tobacco industry hid behind the statistical technicality that while there is a high correlation between increased cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and even though lung cancer was rare before smoking became popular, it’s only a correlation. This means it shows a relationship, but does not prove a cause. This technical foolishness held up until the evidence became so overwhelming that common sense won the day.

Whether or not high fructose corn syrup is a primary cause of obesity, there are other concerns. It may contribute more to fat that is stored deep in the body around the abdominal organs.

This fat is known to promote pre-diabetes (insulin resistance) and <0x000A>to increase blood fats (triglycerides).
The bottom line

If you are trying to lose body fat, or you are among the tens of millions of Americans suffering from the epidemic of pre-diabetes, reduce sugar intake, and especially intake of high fructose corn syrup. Examine the ingredients on food labels, and if you see high fructose corn syrup, avoid that food.

Cut fat, too, and saturated fat especially. Cutting back on these dietary villains can work wonders for your health and your physique. Go for it!


© Dailycomet

A small butane lighter that’s the size and shape of a cigarette. That’s what this is. It even looks like a cigarette! Buy a new pack of cigarettes, take one out, light it with this lighter, then put the lighter BACK IN THE PACK!!! That way, you’ll always have a lighter with you but you won’t have to give up precious pocket space.

It’s a simple $1.50 solution to a not-so-complex problem. You’re on your own as far as finding somewhere to smoke is concerned, as you can no longer legally smoke inside, outside, underground, underwater, or in the future — only back in time and inside a smoking helmet.

HANOI — Vietnam will ban smoking in indoor public places next year and raise tobacco taxes to curb demand for cigarettes, the government said in a statement seen on Tuesday.

Smoking will be illegal in schools, kindergartens, cinemas, office buildings and on public transport, said a statement posted on the government’s website.

The statement did not say whether indoor restaurants would be included in the ban, which will take effect on January 1.

Tariffs on tobacco products and imported cigarettes will be raised, but the government did not specify by how much.

Retail sales of cigarettes will be allowed only in certain locations and a ban on selling cigarettes to people under 18 will be more rigorously applied, the government said.

Cigarette-smoking is widespread in Vietnam, which has one of the world’s highest male smoking rates and where cigarettes are widely available at small streetside kiosks.

Men in rural areas also like to relax with large traditional pipes made of bamboo filled with strong tobacco.

Advertising for tobacco is banned in public places in the communist nation of about 86 million people.

Smoking a shisha pipe is as bad for people as smoking tobacco, the Department of Health and the Centre for Tobacco Control Research has found.

People who smoke shisha, or herbal tobacco, can suffer from high carbon monoxide levels, its research revealed.

It found one session of smoking shisha resulted in carbon monoxide levels at least four to five times higher than the amount produced by a cigarette.

High levels of carbon monoxide can lead to brain damage and unconsciousness.

Shisha is an Arabic water-pipe in which fruit-scented tobacco is burnt using coal, passed through an ornate water vessel and inhaled through a hose.

Dr Hilary Wareing, director of the Centre for Tobacco Control Research, told the BBC’s Asian Network she was shocked by the results of the research.

“Our mouths opened at the level of harm – none of the tests we did showed anything other than shisha is hazardous to health.”

Paul Hooper, regional manager at the Department of Health, said the findings made the dangers of shisha a “major issue”.

He said many people regard shisha “as not even smoking”.

Misconception

Shisha bars, which are typically decked out with low stools and soft cushions to create an inviting atmosphere, have become popular in cities across the UK, particularly London, Manchester and Birmingham.

At the worst, shisha was 400 to 450 times more dangerous than having a cigarette
An activity largely associated with Middle Eastern customers and a young crowd, there is a growing trend of themed shisha parties.

Many people who go to “shisha evenings” think it is a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes.

“You never see it in the news – ‘that is terrible, don’t do it’ – there’s no shock tactics like (there is with) cigarettes,” said one young woman.

“If my mum sees me smoking shisha, she isn’t going to take it as seriously as if I was smoking cigarettes,” said a British Pakistani man.

It was this misconception – and finding dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in a pregnant woman who had stopped smoking tobacco, but continued to smoke shisha – which prompted the research.

“We found one session of smoking shisha – that’s 10 milligrams for 30 minutes – gave carbon monoxide levels that were at the lowest four and five times as high as having a cigarette,” said Dr Wareing.

“But at the worst, shisha was 400 to 450 times more dangerous than having a cigarette,” she added.

Informed choice

Man smoking shisha in Edgware Road
Edgware Road is home to a large number of shisha cafes or hookah bars

Shisha smokers in a cafe in Edgware Road, London, said the findings would make them think twice about smoking.

“You know you can die from cigarettes, but you don’t know you can die from shisha,” said one.

“I’m now going home to research it,” said another.

But not everyone is convinced.

Akram, a 27-year-old who runs a restaurant and shisha bar in Birmingham, has his own views.

“There is a health risk but it’s all down to consumption and all the evidence I’ve seen is that smoking shisha is nothing like smoking even one cigarette,” he said.

He said he did not actually inhale shisha smoke.

It is not just the level of carbon monoxide that is causing concern.

Qasim Choudhory, a youth worker at the NHS Stop Smoking Service in Leicester, said sharing a shisha pipe could pass around infections.

“There’s a heightened risk of getting TB, herpes and infections like that,” she said.

“Now you know swine flu is on the top of the agenda right now – there’s no kind of direct correlation, but at time when we’re up on our hygiene, it’s not the best type of activity to be taking part in.”

Dr Wareing said more research on exactly how dangerous shisha was needed to be conducted to enable people to make an informed choice.

Paul Hooper said the department was working hard at “how best to get the message – that it is dangerous – across to the consumer”.

“But how do you label the tobacco and the shisha pipe? It’s not as simple as labelling a packet of cigarettes,” he added.


The Trouble with Hubble-Bubble will be broadcast on the BBC’s Asian Network at 1800 BST on 24 August 2009.