Chewing Tobacco Facts

Chewing tobacco comes in four major varieties: loose leaf tobacco, plug tobacco, twist tobacco, and tobacco bits.

Native Americans chewed tobacco leaves for thousands of years in North and South America.

The market peaked for chewing tobacco around the year 1910.

Sports such as baseball used to have cultural ties to chewing tobacco, but now its use is banned at most organized sporting events.

According to the CDC's 2007 study, more than 13% of high school boys and 2% of high school girls are users of smokeless tobacco.

Approximately 12 to 14 million Americans regularly use chewing tobacco. One-third of them are under the age of 21, and one-half of them started chewing before they were 13 years old.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about 30,000 Americans each year learn that they have mouth and throat cancers, and 8,000 of them die of these diseases.

Only about half of people diagnosed with mouth or throat cancer survive more than five years.

Some substances commonly found in chewing tobacco include Polonium 210, TSNAs, Formaldehyde, Nicotine, Cadmium, Cyanide, Arsenic, Benzene, and Lead.

The nicotine from chewing tobacco is absorbed straight into the bloodstream and can be very addicting. People who chew often keep changing brands to get stronger doses of nicotine because they become desensitized to it.