Of course, that seems to be exactly what is going on:

>"These considerations of mechanism suggest that at chronic doses close to the toxic dose, any chemical, whether synthetic or natural, and whether genotoxic or nongenotoxic, is a likely rodent and human carcinogen. Not all chemicals would be expected to be carcinogens at high doses; the MTD may not be reached (101) or the chemical may be toxic without causing cell killing or mitogenesis."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC54830/

It might be that anything consumed in excess, over long periods of time, causes mutations in your body. Just a theory.

For that to be the case it should be accumulated in the body in the form of toxins or similar molecules, there's no other 'memory'.

So no, it does not work exactly like that. Some chemical compounds trigger mutations at a higher rate than others.

Plants, fruits, starchy vegetables..

Tobacco is a plant!

A wonderfully aromatic plant …

Cooking and eating it won't have the same effect (cancer wise) as smoking it.

Chewing tobacco does bad things.

I wonder if that's due to the other stuff typically added to chewing tobacco.

It'd be interesting if tobacco could be safer, but isn't, because the manufacturers don't want to incur the expense and anti-tobacco folks want to keep people from smoking at all, not make it safer (c.f. vaping, which is — I think — basically harmless and yet is banned as much as smoking is).

According to the American Cancer Society:

> The most harmful cancer-causing substances in smokeless tobacco are tobacco-specific nitrosamines.

> Cancers linked to the use of smokeless tobacco include:

  * Mouth, tongue, cheek, and gum cancer
  * Cancer in the esophagus
  * Pancreatic cancer

You can also get other kinds of mouth and tooth problems, and of course nicotine is still a definite health risk.

If there were a way to make tobacco healthy, I think the manufacturers would have spared no expense to do so, because the death of a customer prevents them from spending more money on what is sold.

(No idea about anti-vaping people, though.)

None of these are true for snus, and the American Cancer Society hasn't been the most trustworthy party on tobacco (although they should be.)

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=swedish%20snus

The Lancet article is good, but there's a universal consensus.

It's based on roasting/burning it, the same reason why meat is cancer-causing. That's also why Swedish snus probably isn't cancer causing, because instead of being roasted, the tobacco is steam pasteurized.

I can't imagine that cigarettes would work with steamed leaves.

edit: And you'd have to vape the steamed leaf cigarettes, of course.

Surely there are plenty of plants containing chemicals which if injested in some way could cause a change in cell mutations.

To confirm your point, last time I checked, vegans were still dying from cancer too.

You get DNA damage from a lot of different sources, from food to viruses to radiation to industrial chemicals to just plain replication errors.

I agree vegans probably still get cell damage from the food they eat, but that's not proof positive because they would still die from cancer even if they didn't.