The Truth about Lung Cancer

Jean Calment, who stopped smoking at the age of 117

Everyone knows smoking causes lung cancer. But if that’s true, how do you explain Jeanne Calment, the oldest verified person in history, who lived to the age of 122 and only quit smoking five years before she died, at the age of 117?

I frequently coach people whose aged parents in their 80s smoke, and while they might have some health problems they refuse to quit, and also do not have lung cancer. While it appears to make sense that smoking might cause lung cancer—breathing in smoke on a regular basis—the data is actually pretty sus.

I also always wondered why there is a known association with smoking cigarettes and lung cancer, but not marijuana, which is ultimately also the same act of burning leaves and breathing in the smoke. While plants can vary in their chemical composition, and cigarettes can contain lots of added harmful chemicals, is this a problem of tobacco? One study claims that smoking pot raises lung cancer risk by twice, while the CDC claims smoking tobacco raises it by 15 to 30 times, which besides being an absurd factor is also quite the spread of values. Which is it? 15? Or 30?

This is a chart of the lung cancer death rates in men since 1950, and by looking at the data, if you squint, you might be able to find some association with rates of smoking. But there is a major problem with the narrative, which is that rates of smoking in the USA actually began to decline in the 1950s, after it’s peak in 1954 at the lowest rate of lung cancer deaths in the above dataset, yet the rate of lung cancer deaths continue climbing in the USA until 1990, even when rates of smoking had dropped to about 28%, from the high of 45%, and does not align with the lung cancer rate even slightly.

What’s even more interesting is the rate of lung cancer deaths in the United Kingdom, which from looking at the chart above, can be seen to peak about 50% greater than the lung cancer deaths in the United States. From that data and assuming that smoking is the primary cause of lung cancer as is so commonly claimed, the UK should then have a higher rate of smoking? In 1948, 2 years before the lung cancer rate chart above even starts, at the lowest rate of lung cancer in the dataset, an insane 82% of British males smoked tobacco. Yet by the peak of lung cancer deaths in the UK around 1980 the rate of smoking had declined to around 35%. So why was the UK rate of lung cancer nearly three times higher in 1980 when the peak use of tobacco was in 1948, and the rate of lung cancer lowest when the rate of smoking was highest? It’s also not like smoking was new—tobacco had also been a major cash crop for several centuries at this point, so to have such a low rate of lung cancer in 1950 without considering the high prevalence of tobacco use for the previous few hundred years is just incompetence.

It’s pretty insane how incongruous the data is between claims of smoking and lung cancer. I do not believe smoking is healthy, and there are real problems I have observed such as when I tried to become a smoker 6 years ago (I didn’t get hooked) when it stopped my hair regrowth progress, likely due to the vasoconstrictive effect of nicotine on the cardiovascular system, but there is definitely not sufficient data to prove that smoking tobacco increases the rate of lung cancer by much, if at all, and certainly not 15 to 30 times, and the factor is probably similar to smoking marijuana, which is 2.

There is, however, a major factor which does correlate with the data of lung cancer deaths, and that is the adoption of leaded gasoline, which began in the 1920s and was not seriously addressed until the 1970s to the 1990s, with Algeria being the very last country to outlaw it just five years ago in 2021. Lead is a well established carcinogen, besides being in old pipes, paint, and other industrial uses it was added to the gasoline for motor vehicles and became airborne from the exhaust. The increase in rates of lung cancer better correlate with the adoption rates of driving and thus the use of leaded gasoline and exposure to leaded motor vehicle exhaust. Unlike rates of smoking, bans on leaded gasoline correlate exactly with rise and decline in lung cancer rates, where for instance the UK’s ban was immediate and so there is a rapid decline in lung cancer, while Sweden’s ban began in 1978, exactly when their rates of cancer stop rising, but was gradually implemented and not finalized until 1995. The USA also had a partial ban in 1985, which slowed the rate, but which wasn’t fully implemented until 1996, when rates finally begin to decline.

While rates of lung cancer have been declining the decline is also very slow and probably correlates with the slow elimination of lead from the environment. I also happened on an article and study, however, which shows that lung cancer rates in Sweden have not correlated with smoking rates at all, and has even risen in some cases, and it is likely there could be some unknown environmental lead problem or some other unknown carcinogen factor. But it is clear from the data that smoking is not even remotely as associated with the spikes in lung cancer which occurred in the last half of the previous century as has been previously claimed, but instead was a misunderstanding, or purposeful distraction, from the harms caused by leaded gasoline.

This does not mean that people should go out and smoke, as it’s not actually a healthy behavior, just that it’s not quite as harmful as previously thought (and cigarettes can often have added chemicals which are far more harmful to breathe in than smoke from natural tobacco). It is also not known (as this is a discovery in my work) that smoking and nicotine are not actually addictive, which is why I did not get addicted when I tried to smoke during my time in recovery, but instead is a self-medication behavior for the high amounts of cyanide in tobacco smoke, which serves to scavenge (temporarily) a great deal of oxidative stress and helps fight opportunistic pathogens (also temporarily) , as cyanide is also used as a substrate for immune cells to kill invasive microbes, and that tobacco/nicotine addiction is in fact a consequence of low dietary cyanide which can be resolved through the daily consumption of high cyanogenic foods like brassicas (broccoli, arugula, etc.), yuca, bamboo shoots, etc., as discussed in my book, F*ck Portion Control. Cancer is caused by factors which interrupt mitochondrial respiration, which is also discussed in my book, and anyone with cancer can start at my cancer guide to learn how to treat it.