BASEBALL PLAYERS AND CHEWING TOBACCO

Report #6306

A study in the Journal of the American Dental Association shows that 39 percent of professional baseball players use chewing tobacco and 46 percent of the users have precancerous mouth sores and gum disease.

Most of the tobacco-chewing athletes claimed that no one ever told of them of the risks. Some players quit chewing tobacco after they were examined by dentists and shown pictures of their tobacco- related mouth disease. Most had difficulty quitting and some successfully gave up chewing tobacco after using non-nicotine gum or learning behavior modification techniques.

The players chewed tobacco to make themselves more alert,/ became addicted to the nicotine and felt that they needed tobacco to play well. Nicotine causes the body to produce large amounts of its own natural stimulants such as adrenalin and nor adrenalin. Chewing tobacco can be more addicting than smoking it. Athletes can tolerate much larger doses of nicotine without suffering from side effects when they chew tobacco than when they smoke it. When you smoke tobacco, the nicotine is absorbed from the lungs and reaches the brain in a concentrated form because the blood is not diluted by blood from other parts of the body. 8 seconds after you puff on a cigarette, almost all of the nicotine in the smoke is in your brain/ and you have to wait before you smoke again/ or you may develop a headache or feel nauseous. On the other hand, when you chew tobacco, the nicotine is diluted by blood from the rest of the body before it reaches your brain, so that small amounts of nicotine reach the brain continuously over long periods of time and you can tolerate more of it.