uk bat.com - Tobacco ingredients

Ingredients have been added to tobacco since the 16th century

We want consumers and governments to know the facts about ingredients used by our companies in the manufacture of cigarettes, cigars, roll-your-own tobacco, pipe tobacco and smokeless snus.

The primary component of all our companies’ products is of course tobacco and the character, flavour and aroma is determined mostly by the tobaccos used.

In fact, cigarette brands can contain many kinds to tobacco - blending different types of leaf from many growing regions and harvests.

Small quantities of other ingredients have been added to tobacco products for hundreds of years - helping to control moisture levels, maintaining product quality or acting as binders or fillers.

Certain food-type ingredients, or flavourings, are added to balance the natural tobacco taste, often replacing sugars lost in the curing process.

Several of the flavourings used are recognised food stuffs such as sugar, while others are derived from natural herbs and spices or their essential oils.

Consumers like choice and ingredients allow manufacturers to widen the variety on offer and compete for custom.

You can find out what’s in your brand by visiting www.bat-ingredients.com  to see ingredients by country and brand.

Exploding the myths

Some anti-tobacco groups claim that ingredients are used to make smoking more appealing to children and more addictive.

Through the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, an international treaty, the activists would like to see broad-based ingredients bans by governments worldwide.

We want to stress that:

• All tobacco products pose risks to health, but based on available scientific evidence, the ingredients our companies use, at the levels used, do not add to the health risks of smoking. Nor do they encourage people to start smoking or affect a person’s ability to quit.
  
• Ingredients are not added to make our tobacco products appealing to children, and there is no evidence that they have this effect.
  
• Although ingredients in some types of cigarettes include sugars, cocoa and fruit extracts, they do not create a sweet, chocolate-like or fruity taste in the smoke. In short, our cigarettes still taste like cigarettes and not sweets or candy.
  
• Nicotine is not added to tobacco products - it occurs naturally in tobacco.

Blended versus unblended cigarettes

Smokers in countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK have historically preferred the taste of Virginia-style cigarettes which contain few or no ingredients.

In the US and Germany, for example, smokers prefer cigarettes that blend different types of tobaccos and use ingredients. Such brands are known as US blended.

If the allegations about addictiveness and attractiveness of ingredients had any basis in fact, you would expect to see higher take-up rates for smoking, lower rates for quitting and higher incidences of tobacco-related diseases in US blended markets. Yet, this is not the case.

Baseless bans and unintended consequences

We would support restrictions on ingredients based on sound evidence, supported by published and peer-reviewed science, that ingredients induce the under-age to smoke or make tobacco products more addictive or harmful.

Baseless bans will destroy the livelihoods of thousands of growers of burley and oriental tobacco worldwide. These types of tobacco are found in blended cigarettes and generally need the addition of ingredients.

Malawi, for example, is the largest source of burley tobacco in the world. Tobacco generates more than 70 per cent of the country’s foreign exchange, employs 25 per cent of the workforce and contributes 38 per cent of the small African nation’s gross domestic product.

We are also concerned that any ban on US blended cigarettes could drive many consumers to the black market to find the tastes they prefer, adding to a growing global problem of illicit trade.

Illicit trade accounts for an ever increasing proportion of the tobacco market in a growing number of countries - an estimated 30 per cent in Ireland, over a quarter in Romania and Malaysia and 50 per cent in Hong Kong, for example.

Of course, black market cigarette sellers are unlikely to adhere to laws about not selling to the under age.