Chemicals in Cigarettes: From Plant to Product to Puff

You probably know that cigarettes can kill you—in fact, smoking kills half of those who don't quit¹—but do you really have the full story? Do you know how many harmful chemicals are in cigarettes or how they get into the product?

FDA created these videos and interactive tools to lay the foundation for an important public health goal: we aim to publish a list of the levels of harmful and potentially harmful chemicals in tobacco, in a way that is easy for the public to understand. As an important step toward that goal, we invite you to explore the chemicals in tobacco in three stages of cigarettes, from plant to product to puff, in the videos below.

Chemicals in Every Tobacco Plant

It is a fact that cigarettes contain dangerous chemicals.² But how do these chemicals get into cigarettes? Are most of the harmful chemicals added during the manufacturing process?

Fact: Some of the toxic chemicals in tobacco are present in the plant itself.³ Watch the tobacco growth video to uncover more.

Chemicals in Every Cigarette Product

Ok, so harmful chemicals are in the tobacco plant. What happens during manufacturing? Is that when more dangerous chemicals are added?

Fact: Not all of the harmful chemicals created during cigarette manufacturing are man-made. Some of the carcinogens occur naturally as tobacco is cured.³ Watch the video about cigarette manufacturing.

Chemicals in Every Puff of Cigarette Smoke

How many harmful and potentially harmful chemicals are in a cigarette? Is there more than nicotine and tar?

Fact: There are more than 7,000 chemicals in cigarette smoke.² More than 70 of those chemicals are linked to cancer.^4,5,6,7 Watch the video on cigarette smoke to learn more about what happens when you light up.

Think You Know All the Chemicals Found in Cigarettes?

Here are some of the 93 known harmful and potentially harmful chemicals in cigarettes:

 

 

 

Downloads

Download and share with people in your life these images about the health effects of dangerous chemicals in cigarettes. To download:

1. Click on the image below that you would like to download and share to open up a larger version.
2. On the large version, right-click to Save As and save the image to your computer.

 

 

 

 

 

References

1. Doll R, Peto R, Wheatley K, Gray R, Sutherland I. Mortality in relation to smoking: 40 years observations on male British doctors. British Medical Journal 1994; 309:901-911.
2. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). A Report of the Surgeon General: How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease: What It Means to You (Consumer Booklet). Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health; 2010.
3. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease: The Biology and Behavioral Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease: A Report of the Surgeon General. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health; 2010.
4. Hecht SS. Research opportunities related to establishing standards for tobacco products under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Nicotine & Tobacco Research. 2012; 14(1):18-28.
5. Hoffmann D, Hoffmann I, El Bayoumy K. The less harmful cigarette: a controversial issue. A tribute to Ernst L. Wynder. Chemical Research in Toxicology. 2001; 14:767-790.
6. International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Some non-heterocyclic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and some related exposures. In: IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans. Vol. 92. Lyon, France: International Agency for Research on Cancer; 2010.
7. International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). Tobacco smoke and involuntary smoking. In: IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans. Vol. 83. Lyon, France: International Agency for Research on Cancer; 2004.

CTP Newsroom

News & Events

Recent news, press releases, meetings, workshops, newsletters, and other announcements are listed below.

2017

• October 2017: FDA Actions Regarding Tobacco Manufacturers/Importers Affected by Recent Natural Disasters
• September 2017: Newsletter - CTPConnect
• September 2017: FDA Announces Flavor Developer and Manufacturer Site Tours Program
• August 2017: Newsletter - Spotlight on Science
• July 2017: FDA’s New Plan for Tobacco and Nicotine Regulation
• June 2017: Newsletter - CTPConnect
• June 2017: Statement from FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. on the 2016 National Youth Tobacco Survey Results
• June 2017: CDC Press Release - Youth Tobacco Product Use, Including E-Cigarettes, Drops During 2015-2016
• May 2017: Web Statement
• April 2017: Newsletter - Spotlight on Science
• April 2017: Public Workshop - Battery Safety Concerns in Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) Public Workshop
• March 2017: Newsletter - CTPConnect
• February 2017: Web Feature - Dip, Chew, Snuff, Snus: "Smokeless" Doesn’t Mean "Safe"
• January 2017: Web Statement - FDA Offers Compliance Policy for Certain Vape Shop Activities in New Draft Guidance

2016

• December 2016: Press Release - FDA takes action on applications seeking to market modified risk tobacco products
• December 2016: Web Feature - Lessons Learned from the First Review of Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) Applications
• November 2016: Public Workshop - Risk Assessment
• November 2016: Web Feature - How Cigarettes Are Made and How You Can Make a Plan to Quit
• October 2016: Public Workshop - The Premarket Tobacco Product Application for Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS)
• September 2016: Press Release - FDA protects kids from illegal sales of e-cigarettes, e-liquids and cigars
• May 2016: Press Release - FDA takes significant steps to protect Americans from dangers of tobacco through new regulation
• May 2016: Press Release - FDA launches public education campaign to prevent and reduce tobacco use among LGBT young adults
• April 2016: Press Release - FDA launches first ad campaign focused on dangers of smokeless tobacco among rural teens
• April 2016: Public Workshop - Biomarkers of Potential Harm
• March 2016: Web Feature - Diabetes and Tobacco Use
• March 2016: Meeting - Society For Research On Nicotine and Tobacco
• March 2016: Public Workshop - Waterpipes

Archived Content

Search for past news and events in the FDA.gov web archive.

• Press release archive
• Email newsletters & web statements archive
• Features archive
• Public meeting and workshop archive

Public Health Education Campaigns

CTP is investing in a number of public education campaigns to help educate the public—especially youth—about the dangers of regulated tobacco products. Rooted in science, these efforts are directly linked to FDA's authority to regulate the marketing and sales of tobacco products.

We encourage public health advocates and other interested members of the public to engage with our campaigns through the information and materials found here.

• The Real Cost campaign
• Fresh Empire campaign
• This Free Life campaign

"We have a responsibility…to reduce the death and disease toll from tobacco use. That includes educating kids about the harms of tobacco use in an effective way, in a way that will reach them."

-- Mitch Zeller, Director, Center for Tobacco Products
Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2013

Achieving our mission to reduce tobacco-related death and disease requires a comprehensive, innovative approach. Most of our campaigns will focus on changing the attitudes and beliefs that lead young people to start smoking by developing messages and tactics through an evidence-based process that includes:

• Identifying the problem to address
• Researching the target audience and the best way to reach them
• Testing messages and materials with the target audience
• Sharing the messages using a variety of media
• Assessing how effectively the messages reached the target audience and changing the messages if necessary

Current Campaigns

The Real Cost Campaign

"What's a pack of smokes cost?  Your smooth skin."

"Smoking causes wrinkles that age you prematurely. What are cigarettes costing you?"

So says FDA's first-ever national public education campaign to discourage youth tobacco use. The groundbreaking campaign, "The Real Cost” launched in February 2014 and continues to reach young people open to smoking or already experimenting with cigarettes in more than 200 markets across the country through TV, radio, print, digital, and out-of-home sites such as mall and theme park displays. In April 2016, “The Real Cost” expanded its campaign brand umbrella to include new advertising targeting rural male youth ages 12-17 at risk of smokeless tobacco use. The rural advertising will mainly air in targeted local markets. Edgy, innovative, and featuring the young people it seeks to reach, the campaign talks with youth by focusing on the issues they really care about, like loss of control due to addiction and cosmetic health effects.

Are you a teen looking for The Real Cost?

Fresh Empire Campaign

"Setting sights on CEO OF INDEPENDENCE as my goal. So I reject cigarettes to regain control."

"I reject anything, including tobacco, that tries to control me."

Empowering words from FDA's first campaign to discourage multicultural teens—specifically African American, Hispanic, and Asian American/ Pacific Islander youth who identify with hip-hop—from using tobacco. "Fresh Empire" launched in May 2015 and will reach multicultural youth who identify with the hip-hop peer crowd in markets throughout the country through TV, radio, print, the web, social media, and local hip-hop events by the end of 2016. Understanding that tobacco use is often portrayed as a norm amongst the hip-hop peer crowd, the campaign talks with youth using aspirational messaging to convey that tobacco use is not a necessary part of the hip-hop lifestyle.

Are you a teen looking for Fresh Empire?

This Free Life Campaign

"Joy is on the horizon. Health and happiness—these are our new destinations. But a factor that seems casual to some in the community can get in our way. Like tobacco.”

“This new life—free from judgment, free from the shadows—will also be free from tobacco.”

With these words, FDA presents “This Free Life,” a public education campaign designed to prevent and reduce tobacco use among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young adults ages 18-24 in the United States. LGBT young adults are nearly twice as likely to use tobacco as other young adults. “This Free Life” launched in May 2016 and uses print, digital, social media, outdoor signage and local events to reach the more than 800,000 occasional smokers in the LGBT community to help protect them from tobacco-related disease and prevent the loss of tens of thousands of LGBT lives to tobacco use each year.  

The campaign uses authentic and credible messages from tobacco-free members of the LGBT community to challenge the perception that tobacco use is a necessary part of LGBT culture, and to show LGBT young adults they can be the person they want to be and still live tobacco free.

Are you an LGBT young adult looking for “This Free Life?”

Future Campaigns and Education Programs

Additional efforts are in development. These will target specific key audiences, including:

• Youth who are American Indian / Alaskan Native
• Tobacco users (to be implemented at tobacco point-of-sale)
• Tobacco product retailers

Don't Start

Although you may see people using tobacco in movies, tv, and advertisements, most teens, adults, and athletes don’t use it. The nicotine in tobacco products is addictive. The best way to be tobacco free is not to start.

• Seriously - Why Start?
• Learn More About
• For Parents, Teachers, and Coaches

Seriously - Why Start?

What Smoking Can Do To Your Lungs

Nearly all tobacco use begins in youth and young adulthood—88% of adult daily smokers smoked their first cigarette before turning 18. Approximately 18% of high school students smoke cigarettes. Nearly 10% use smokeless tobacco, and young people who use smokeless tobacco are more likely to become cigarette smokers as adults.

By helping teens and young adults avoid using tobacco, we will help them live longer and healthier lives. We can make the next generation tobacco free.

Risk & Protective Factors

Is your child at risk of using or becoming addicted tobacco? Learn the signs and factors in this Office of Adolescent Health (OAH) resource.

Talk to Your Kids about Tobacco, Alcohol, and Drugs

Learn the basics and start a conversation with your kids about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Use this healthfinder.gov resource as your guide.

Talk With Your Teen

Get tips for talking about tobacco and tobacco use with your teen from this OAH resource.

Ideas for Getting Started

Unsure how to start a conversation about tobacco use with your kids? Get tips in this OAH resource.

Where there's Smoke: The Effects of Smoking on the Human Body

Use this lesson plan from the CDC to demonstrate what goes into a person's lungs with each puff of a cigarette and how that smoke affects a person's body.

Tobacco Free Sports Initiatives

Promote healthy alternatives to tobacco use with these CDC fact sheets, handouts, and guides.

Stamp Out Smoking
Tobacco-Free Living

Most of us know that smoking is unhealthy. So why do so many people still do it? The answers are complex. Researchers have found effective ways to help people quit smoking—or prevent them from starting in the first place. The tricky part is putting these tools to use. We can all take steps to help stamp out smoking.

Fifty years ago, the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health revealed that smoking cigarettes raises your risk of developing several diseases. Since then, smoking rates have declined, saving millions of lives. But at the same time, more than 20 million Americans have died too soon because of smoking. And more than 3,200 children under age 18 smoke their first cigarette every day as a result of tobacco industry marketing and other influences.

We know a lot more than we used to about the dangers of tobacco smoke. “When you smoke, you inhale thousands of hazardous chemicals,” explains Dr. Michele Bloch, a tobacco control expert at NIH. “They travel all around inside your body and cause damage to numerous parts.”

Cigarette smoke can quickly damage delicate lung tissue. It doesn’t have a chance to heal when it’s exposed to smoke day after day. The result can be a wide range of deadly lung conditions, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

The chemicals from tobacco smoke travel from the lungs into the bloodstream. They damage your heart and blood vessels to cause cardiovascular problems, such as heart disease and stroke. Cardiovascular disease kills over 800,000 people a year nationwide.

The compounds in tobacco smoke can enter cells throughout your body and damage the DNA inside. DNA is the long threadlike molecule found in nearly all your cells. It’s an essential “blueprint” that controls how your cells grow, where they go, and what they do.

When DNA gets damaged, cells can begin to grow abnormally. The body usually attacks and kills such cells. But the toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke weaken this process, making it easier for the cells to multiply out of control. The result is cancer.

Smokers dramatically increase their risk of developing many types of cancer. Nearly all lung cancer—the number-one cancer killer—is caused by smoking. Smoking can lead to cancer in many parts of the body, including the throat, mouth, nasal cavity, stomach, pancreas, liver, kidney, bladder, colon, rectum, and cervix. It can also cause leukemia, a cancer of the blood.

Smoking can cause all sorts of other health issues, too. When the DNA in sperm becomes damaged, it can lead to infertility. Smoking while you’re pregnant can cause a host of problems, including low birth weight and preterm delivery. Smokers are 30% to 40% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than nonsmokers. And smoking can make it harder for the body to fight disease.

“People who are exposed to secondhand smoke from other people’s cigarettes have many of these same problems,” Bloch says. Secondhand smoke contains a mixture of hazardous compounds similar to that inhaled by smokers. Researchers estimate that 2.5 million nonsmokers have died from secondhand smoke since 1964.

The best way to prevent tobacco-related health problems is to keep kids from smoking in the first place. “The vast majority of new smokers begin when they are too young to appreciate the risk,” Bloch says.

“Usually people start smoking when they are adolescents,” explains Dr. Ivan Montoya, an NIH expert on treating substance abuse. “Adolescents who start smoking regularly can very quickly become addicted to nicotine and tobacco. It is then very difficult to quit.”

Nicotine is the primary drug in tobacco that causes addiction. “Nicotine is a very addictive substance,” Montoya says. “It takes only a few contacts with the substance to become addicted.”

It takes just 10 seconds for the nicotine from one puff of smoke to reach the brain. Once it gets there, it causes cells in the brain to release a chemical called dopamine. The dopamine can make you feel calm and satisfied, or alert and focused. Over time, the brain cells of smokers change to expect regular bursts of extra dopamine. When smokers try to quit, their brains crave more nicotine.

“Some people are more susceptible than others to get addicted to tobacco,” Montoya says. Scientists have found some genes that seem to be involved in nicotine dependence, but the work is still ongoing.

Researchers do know that the health of even long-time smokers can improve quickly after quitting. Within a year of quitting, heart attack risk drops dramatically. Within 5 years, the risk of stroke can fall to nearly that of a nonsmoker. Quitting also lowers the risk of cancer and other diseases.

“If you are a smoker, the single most important thing you can do to protect your health and the health of your family is to quit,” Bloch says. “And help is available.”

Research has revealed effective strategies to help people quit smoking. That’s partly why quit rates for smokers are on the rise. More than half of all people who’ve smoked have already quit.

Studies show that people who talk to their doctors about quitting or call quit lines for advice are more successful than those who go it alone. Quitters can double or triple their chances of success by using medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and nicotine patches, gum, or lozenges, along with coaching support.

“Different things work for different people,” explains Dr. David Theodore Levy, a tobacco control expert at Georgetown University Medical Center. “Most people make many quit attempts before they’re successful.” Check to see if stop-smoking therapy is covered under your health plan.

You’ve probably seen electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, promoted as an alternative to traditional cigarettes. These battery-powered devices deliver nicotine to the lungs without burning tobacco. However, they still release hazardous chemicals into the air. Unlike traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes can be advertised on TV and radio, and many people worry that they’ll be attractive to kids.

E-cigarettes aren’t regulated by FDA. Scientists still don’t know their health effects, including how they could affect attempts to quit smoking. “The evidence is only beginning to come in,” Levy says, and research is ongoing.

NIH-funded scientists continue to look for more effective therapies and approaches to help people quit. Researchers are also developing vaccines against nicotine, Montoya says. The vaccine would prompt your body to identify nicotine as a foreign substance and fight to block it from reaching the brain, which might help extinguish the addiction.

“Quitting is lifesaving, and early quitting is especially good,” Bloch says. Let’s all work to end the use of cigarettes and other tobacco products. If you’re a smoker, free help is available at 1-800-QUIT-NOW (1-800-784-8669) and online at smokefree.gov.

 This information is not copyrighted. Print and make as many photocopies as you need.

"Take a Close Look at What the Tobacco Industry Won't Show You" poster is only available on the web.

The Real Cost: Research and Evaluation

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The Real Cost: Research and Evaluation

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