Emissions from herbal cigarettes may be more damaging than those from tobacco ones

Herbal cigarettes, widely sold in India and abroad as natural, tobacco-free, and therapeutic alternatives to conventional cigarettes, are not safer than regular tobacco cigarettes — they produce emissions that can be comparably or even more damaging than tobacco smoke, according to a study.
Findings published in Journal of Hazardous Materials present a comprehensive comparison of the physical, chemical, and oxidative properties of mainstream (first-hand) smoke from commercially available herbal and tobacco cigarettes in the Indian market, researchers said.
“Our findings challenge the widely held belief that tobacco-free means risk-free,” author Sameer Patel, an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar’s department of civil engineering and chemical engineering, said.
The researchers compared emissions from two of India’s best-selling tobacco brands and four popular herbal varieties containing combinations of basil, clove, cinnamon, mint, green tea, water lily, and chamomile. “Emissions from herbal cigarettes are comparable to or exceeded those from tobacco cigarettes on nearly every metric we measured. Leaf-wrapped herbal variants turned out to be the most hazardous of all the samples tested,” Patel said.
The team noted that two of the herbal brands utilised tendu (ebony) leaves as wrappers, identical to those used in bidis, the country’s most widely consumed smoking product.
“Our findings indicate that the emissions characteristics of HCs (herbal cigarettes) matched or even exceeded those of TCs (tobacco cigarettes), suggesting that HCs are as hazardous as TCs and underscoring the urgent need for regulatory oversight guided by a comprehensive toxicological evaluation of herbal cigarettes,” the authors wrote.
“Sub-500 nm (nanometre) particle concentrations were (about) 20 per cent higher in HC than in TC,” they said and added that the fine particles are increasingly linked to cardiovascular and respiratory disease.
Each cigarette was combusted inside a sealed, automated two-chamber rig designed to replicate human inhalation rate. Source: PTI