By Staff Reports
(Hawaii)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
Flavored little cigars and cigarettes are leaving a bad taste in the mouths of health experts and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They say teenagers who smoke have been using these products a lot. The researchers looked at data from the 2011 National Youth Tobacco Survey.
The CDC’s Brian King:
“More than 40 percent of all U.S. middle and high school smokers use flavored little cigars or flavored cigarettes.”
King says the little cigars are made to taste sweet – sometimes like candy – and, because they’re not taxed like cigarettes, they’re cheaper. But he says they’re just as harmful to health as cigarettes. And he says teens seem to be less interested in quitting them than quitting unflavored cigars.
The data are in a CDC report.
Learn more at healthfinder.gov.
HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.