Thetruth.com's lung cancer claim.

Factual Questions
1

Thetruth.com has made tv ads claiming that black men are 50% more likely to get lung cancer than white men. This seems kinda dubious. Their website shows a study, but how reliable is it? Also, (assuming it’s true)does it necessarily mean that smoking is the cause and it is worse for black than whites?

2

Well, black men are 25-30% more likely to smoke than white men (statistics vary), so that would explain a big part of it. However, black women are about as likely as white women to smoke, but suffer more smoking-related health problems (I couldn’t find statistics for lung cancer specifically).

One hypothesis I saw was that the added risk comes from menthol cigarettes, which are much more popular with African-Americans (about 75%) than with whites (about 25%). Perhaps the mechanism by which it works is that it encourages deeper inhalation of the smoke. Stuides on the dangers of menthol cigarettes are contradictory.

3

-snopes, http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/legends/menthol.htm

According to that site, only 25% of menthol smokers are blacks, but 75% of Blacks that smoke use menthols (I think anyways)

Which means that Menthols are not more popular with African americans than whites, unless whites are less than 25% of the menthol smokers. Where would the other 50% be coming from then?

4

"snopes, http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/legends/menthol.htm

According to that site, only 25% of menthol smokers are blacks, but 75% of Blacks that smoke use menthols (I think anyways)

Which means that Menthols are not more popular with African americans than whites, unless whites are less than 25% of the menthol smokers. Where would the other 50% be coming from then? "

You’re a bit mixed up about your statistics there. Essentially,yes 25% of menthol smokers are black, but blacks are also a minority portion of the population, so you’re not looking at things in proportion. If there are more white people in a country than black people, it is likely that more white people will smoke. However, that does not mean that the %of white population who smoke will be greater than %of black people who smoke. So if 75% of black smokers smoke menthols,and 25% of white smokes do, that means that: given equal numbers of black and white people, black people would tend to smoke more menthols. At least i think. Sometimes late at night i say stupid stuff.