The composition of contemporary American and Swedish smokeless tobacco products

摘要

The major components of 70 brands of smokeless tobacco products (STPs) from Sweden and the US were determined to provide greater understanding of the general chemical composition of these products. Various styles ofSTPs were examined: loose and portion snus from Sweden, and chewing tobacco, dry snuf, moist snuf, hard pellet,soft pellet and plug from the US. The components analysed were major STP components such as water, nicotine,sugars, humectants, sodium ions, chloride ions and ash. The relative quantities of the components varied signifcantlybetween diferent styles of STP. The major component of moist snuf and Swedish loose snus is water. With Swedishportion snus water and pouch material comprise more than half of the product mass; with chewing tobaccos waterand sugars comprise around 60% of the products. With these STPs, tobacco was a minor component (30–35%) of theproduct mass. By way of contrast, tobacco comprised the majority (around 70–90%) of the product mass with drysnuf, hard pellet and soft pellet products. Additives such as sugars, propylene glycol, glycerol, and sodium chloridecomprised up to around 12% of the STPs, except for plug and chewing tobaccos where sugars comprised 15–30%by mass of the STP on average. Signifcant disagreements were found amongst alternative methods of determiningwater/moisture content for STPs. In particular the oven method, commonly used to determine moisture in tobacco,gave signifcantly higher values than the Karl Fischer water method when propylene glycol was present. Smaller butsimilar diferences were found using the Near-Infrared method. Choice of measurement technique has importantconsequences for accuracy of toxicant levels when reporting on a dry-weight basis, a commonly used parameter insmokeless tobacco research and emerging regulatory standards. Conversion to a DWB was also found to produce apreferential bias between and within diferent STP categories in favour of drier products. These data provide greaterunderstanding of diferences in the compositions of contemporary smokeless tobacco products, and demonstratechallenges associated with conversion of actual product contents to dry weight basis values.