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Tuesday, June 18, 2013 Smoking and Tobacco Are menthol
cigarettes worse for you than regular cigarettes? (Is the
"rumor" true that they make your lungs bleed for 7 minutes?)
Burning menthol creates benzo[a]pyrenes which are known human
carcinogens. A person who smokes menthol cigarettes commonly
inhales deeper than someone smoking nonmenthol cigarette
presumably due to the pleasant "cool" sensation felt in the
throat and lungs from the menthol. Intuitively, one would assume
that the deeper inhalation would carry more carcinogens farther
into the lungs causing a greater exposure and therefore, a
greater risk of lung cancer. Unfortunately, a search of the
literature was not very revealing. There is a report in the
Archives of Internal Medicine from April 10, 1995 noting that
the type of cigarette smoked made little differen