А вы уже перестали курить табак по утрам?
Интересное обсуждение о вреде табака ко второму разделу курса “ Curanderismo: Traditional Medicine”.
Основные моменты:
1. В маленьких дозах - лекарство и для ритуалов, в больших - яд.
2. Промышленный продукт, как обычно, хуже просто листьев.
3. Органический табак существует только в теории.
[Сохраняю себе наиболее интересный комментарий]
Сохраняю себе наиболее интересный комментарий:
Modern tobacco cultivars sold by corporations though, particularly in the form of cigarettes, have additives added which work to increase the saturation of nicotine in the blood. This is in order to increase the addictiveness of cigarettes and thereby increase consumption by customers. This results in much more inhalation of particulates than is the case for someone not so addicted. Indians did not chain smoke tobacco, which is a useful medicinal herb which works for a number of things.
The problem affects chewing tobacco as well. Old indian tobacco cultivars and wild tobacco are not particularly pleasant or desirable to chew, especially not all the time. Modern stuff has things added.
Why this becomes a problem is that the primary cause of cancer from smoking modern tobacco is Polonium-210. Polonium-210 levels are much higher for modern tobacco because of modern farming practices. Tobacco needs lots of phosphate, and the cheapest source of phosphate, now that all the good caves filled with bat guano have been mined, is ground apatite mineral which is strip mined from giant open pit mines. These deposits have radioactive Polonium, and even Uranium. These radioactive materials end up in pretty much all farms that use inexpensive fertilizer. Even if a farm converts over, the radioactive substances remain in the soil and dust for thousands of years after exposure to modern farming methods, so it's not just a matter of waiting a few years and switching to organic. Organic tobacco raised on farm land formerly subjected to these fertilizers also has these radioactive materials.
Now it's not a big deal for most crops. But tobacco has fine hairs on it. As modern farming plows the soil, it tosses up dust, and it just so happens that tobacco's hairs are excellent at trapping and binding with Polonium particles.
And then you chew it or smoke it and you get Polonium-210 in your system, and this is of course exceptionally carcinogenic, and that's how you get cancer from tobacco, the decay particles hit your DNA and scramble it and after enough of this sometimes it mutates in multiple places badly enough that it not only starts growing useless cells, but the apoptosis mechanism also becomes broken so when the DNA repair mechanisms identify a hopeless case and then try to trigger the bad cell to die, the cell ignores that signal. So that's cancer from DNA damage from decay particles.
That Polonium-210 is the source of tobacco cancer has been extensively researched and this is the main way this happens. And the more you smoke or chew, the worse your chances. And the companies add stuff to make it more addictive, and use cultivars bred to have more nicotine, and to be more pleasant in taste, so users are much more likely to use excessive amounts.
Now of course there is also the argument that inhaling any smoke is intrinsically bad for you. This is sort of true as well, but the main reason it is bad is the Polonium-210. Studies of for example cannabis users find that smoking that medicinal herb actually decreases your chance of getting lung cancer, and does not increase it.
Chronic exposure to smoke, as for say a fireman or factory worker, can damage your lungs, which causes the body to replace more of the cells than is normal. And this can lead to mutations due to errors in cell copying. But the chances of this happening are much much smaller than through direct DNA mutation from radioactive decay particles.
So this all leads us to wonder if we can more safely smoke some sort of tobacco that is grown organically. The answer is theoretically yes, put practically no. The Polonium-210 is out there in farmland and even if you switch to organic it's still there.
What if you raise wild tobacco in a greenhouse, didn't disturb the soil much, and use fish guts or bat guano for fertilizer, and use soil you managed to find in an area far far away from agriculture, perhaps from wild parts of Alaska? Well, that would work and you could produce Polonium free tobacco and use it and your chance of getting cancer would be vastly reduced. You'd also not desire to smoke it or chew it as much since it would have less nicotine than modern cultivars, and would be unsuitable for cigarettes. We smoked it in pipes because that made it more palatable. And we didn't smoke it all that much a long time ago.
…
There are of course those who will say this is all wrong and all tobacco is bad and carcinogenic. But if you understand what the studies show, it's that all modern tobacco is bad. But it's not the tobacco's fault. It's the way it's grown, the way it's modified, the way it's pushed as an addictive drug, all combined together, intentionally, to harm you for profit.
What can we take away from all this? My recommendations are to avoid all corporate tobacco product, even the organic. For ceremony use, grow your own tobacco, use a wild or older cultivar, and be extremely cautious with your fertilizer and soil sources. Simply do not use commercial fertilizer. Make your own from fish remnants.
И ссылка на статью на ту же тему, интересна она еще и упоминанием друга нашего Арафата.
P.S. Побочный эффект джет-лега - очень эффективно заниматься по ночам :)