Chewing tobacco

Nearly all modern chewing tobaccos are produced by leaf curing, cutting, fermentation, and processing, which may include sweetening and flavoring.

It consists of shredded tobacco leaf, usually sweetened and sometimes flavored, and often sold in a sealed pouch typically weighing 3 oz.

Historically, plug tobacco could be either smoked in a pipe or chewed,[citation needed] but today, these are two distinct products.

[2][23] These carcinogenic compounds occurring in chewing tobacco vary widely, and depend upon the kind of product and how it was manufactured.

[27] Use of chewing tobacco also seems to greatly raise the risk of non-fatal ischaemic heart disease among users in Asia, although not in Europe.

"[30]Bill Tuttle was a Major League player who made a big name for himself both through baseball and his anti-chewing tobacco efforts.

Nearly 40 years after he began using smokeless tobacco, Tuttle developed a tumor in his mouth so severe, it protruded through his skin.

[31] Tuttle dedicated the last years of his life to speaking with Major League teams about not using chewing tobacco where television cameras could see the players so that children could not witness and be influenced by it.

He also dedicated time to the National Spit Tobacco Education Program, which was being run by friend and former Major League player, Joe Garagiola.

[33] A 2016 MLB collective bargaining agreement prohibited all new Major League Baseball players from using smokeless tobacco.

Harvard School of Public Health professor Gregory Connolly, however, says, "the use of smokeless tobacco by players has a powerful role-model effect on youth, particularly among young males in sport, some of whom remain addicted in future careers as professional athletes.

[36] Due to health concerns, MLB was asked to ban the use of chewing tobacco during the 2011 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers.

[38] A historian of the American South in the late 1860s reported on typical usage in the region where it was grown, paying close attention to class and gender:[39] The chewing of tobacco was well-nigh universal.

Out of doors where his life was principally led the chewer spat upon his lands without offence to other men, and his homes and public buildings were supplied with spittoons.

The large numbers of Southern men, and these were of the better class (officers in the Confederate army and planters, worth $20,000 or more, and barred from general amnesty) who presented themselves for the pardon of President Johnson, while they sat awaiting his pleasure in the ante-room at the White House, covered its floor with pools and rivulets of their spittle.

An observant traveller in the South in 1865 said that in his belief seven-tenths of all persons above the age of twelve years, both male and female, used tobacco in some form.

Women could be seen at the doors of their cabins in their bare feet, in their dirty one-piece cotton garments, their chairs tipped back, smoking pipes made of corn cobs into which were fitted reed stems or goose quills.

Chewing tobacco is still used, predominantly by young males in some parts of the American South, but also in other areas and age groups.

In September 2006, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for Senator from Virginia admitted to chewing tobacco and agreed that it sets a bad example for children.

[40] In the late 19th century, during the peak in popularity of chewing tobacco in the Western United States, a device known as the spittoon was a ubiquitous feature throughout places both private and public (e.g. parlors and passenger cars).