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x-irradiance 2 points ago +2 / -0

My suspicion is that smoking is far less bad for you than they make it out to seem.

It should be noted that "eliminating cigarette smoking" is (IIRC) one of the Agenda30 goals. Interesting that it doesn't mention any other drugs of addiction.

Anecdotally, I had given up smoking for a couple of years, then resumed in about 2010. I have not had a single respiratory viral infection (that I noticed) since then.

It had been a running joke of mine that it was smoking that protected me from diseases. I thought it might be the placebo effect, and I started writing "Cures all diseases" on each cigarette prior to smoking it. This was just to rile people up in a way that I find gratifying, but once I heard that smoking reduces your chances of getting covid, plus the fact that here in Australia, they charge you $30 for a 20-pack of marlboros, I figured that it can't be for reasons of health that the govt is so heavy-handed here regarding tobacco. You can't even show pictures of the branding on websites that sell tobacco products.

Another data point is that i decided that I should quit or cut down smoking in order to get better physical gains. I enrolled in hot-yoga with the assumption that there's no way my smoke-addled body could handle that, and I'd naturally quit out of utility... but, I in fact found no impact whatsoever due to smoking on my progress with yoga. As such, I still haven't quit.

At the moment, I'm doing this thing where as 'payment' for having a cigarette, I do 10 pull-ups on my bar at home. Even doing this directly after finishing the cigarette, it is just as easy as without. The added benefit is that I can now do 16 in a row.

More datapoints: I did a research dive a while back and found out that scientists have never been able to induce lung cancer in an animal by making it breathe cigarette smoke. So, there is in fact NO DIRECT EVIDENCE that cigarette smoke causes cancer. Plenty of correlations, but no causation.

I love staying fit and strong, and people usually take me to be 10+ years younger than I am (which is around 45).

My somewhat educated opinion is that if indeed smoking causes cancer, it is due to chain-smoking in such a way that one's blood oxygen levels are chronically attenuated. But, so long as you leave an hour or more between cigarettes, you'll be fine.

In any case, it all remains a mystery.

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x-irradiance 1 point ago +1 / -0

I haven’t looked into it for 20 years or so, but there is evidence to suggest that while sunscreen reduces the incidence of some skin cancers, it does nothing and perhaps promotes the likelihood of melanomas.

I might look into it again, perhaps after researching other lost causes like fluoride again.

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x-irradiance 3 points ago +4 / -1

Maybe conspiracies are too mainstream now

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x-irradiance 2 points ago +2 / -0

I guess it really must matter whether you’re black or white.