What's in a cigarette? The FDA Finally Wants to Know!

The US Food and Drug Administration is finally trying to do its job. By June 2010, tobacco companies must tell the FDA their cigarette formulas - for the first time ever. The companies also have to hand in any studies they have done on the effects of such ingredients... cough! cough!

"Tobacco products today are really the only human-consumed product that we don't know what's in them," Lawrence R. Deyton, the director of the Food and Drug Administration's new Center for Tobacco Products and a physician, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. [Yahoo]

However, the FDA won't be publishing cigarette recipes any time soon as the disclosures are still subject to trade secret laws, but they do promise to publish a list of any harmful ingredients.

Cigarettes and their smoke contain more than 4,000 chemicals; among them are more than 60 known carcinogens, according to the American Cancer Society. But scientists say they can't yet tell all they'll learn from the new data because so little is known about how the chemicals combine to affect people.

One major problem is the difference between what is in an unlit cigarette compared with what is in the inhaled smoke. The two cocktails can be very different. Just compare what happens when you burn plastics.

The shift from nicotine addiction through cigarettes to nicotine addiction through smokeless products is going to be a slow crawl.