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The Health Benefits of Growing Your Own Tobacco

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deluxestogie

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How does growing your own tobacco improve your health?

This may seem like an odd question. But the labor of growing your own tobacco is not insignificant. It is meaningful exercise. It's better exercise than walking. In fact 1 hour of average gardening activity is the exercise equivalent of 1.67 hours (an hour and 40 minutes) of walking. That's nothing to sniff at.

A curious study (~142,000 people, over a span of 15 years) appeared recently in The Lancet. It seems that the benefit of exercise on cardio-vascular disease (CVD) has been studied almost entirely in wealthy countries, where exercise is most often regarded as recreational.

Nobody had studied it well in poorer countries, where exercise is usually in the form of required labor. So the questions were basically these:
  • does ordinary, non-recreational labor have the same CVD benefits as recreational exercise?
  • Is the benefit that is seen in wealthy countries also seen in poorer countries?
The short answer to both of these questions is, yes.

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(17)31634-3.pdf

The above article is tedious to interpret. Here's what can be sifted from it.
  1. All sorts of things contribute to CVD deaths. Adequate exercise vs. inadequate exercise accounts for more or less 10% of the cause of CVD death. So if you are an athlete, rather than a couch potato (all other risk factors being equal), you reduce your chance of death from CVD by roughly 10%. [Of course, if you exercise, you are far less likely to be overweight, and far less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, etc. But the exercise part alone accounts for ~10% of the risk.]
  2. Gardening, in general, appears to be 1.67 times as effective as walking in reducing your risk of death by CVD.
  3. You can approach the maximum CVD benefit of gardening exercise at about 1.25 hours (75 minutes) of gardening per day.
My own tobacco growing is typically about 200 plants. I easily spend 1 to 2 hours per day in the garden, from early May to early September.

Naturally, you could derive the same exercise benefit by growing carrots, quinoa or kale.

Bob
 

OldDinosaurWesH

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Yes, growing other things in the garden will impart a similar amount of exercise. But where's the challenge in that? Growing tobacco is a technically difficult thing to do. Tobacco requires more than just exercise, it requires brainpower. And it has been suggested that brain activity helps prevent Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain conditions. You can achieve brain activity by reading a book. But you can combine brain activity with exercise by growing tobacco.*

Wes H.

* just my opinion, not any specific science behind it. And I spend 1 to 2 hours a day working in my tobacco garden.
 

Jitterbugdude

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My doctor is going to love this. He's always telling me I should do cardio 3x a week. Next time I see him I'll tell him I took his advice and spend an hour a day growing Tobacco.
 

webmost

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Naturally, you could derive the same exercise benefit by growing carrots, quinoa or kale.

Yabbut, then all you'd have to show for it is orange ick, white yuck, or green gack. Makes me shudder even to think about it.
 
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