Gutkha does more harm than paan 8212; Study

AHMEDABAD, OCT 24: A public Interest Litigation PIL filed in High Court has sparked off another debate on the effects of gutkha consumpt...

AHMEDABAD, OCT 24: A public Interest Litigation PIL filed in High Court has sparked off another debate on the effects of gutkha consumption. Interestingly, a study conducted by six experts at Gujarat Cancer and Research Institute GCRI which was published way back in 1996 sheds light on the matter.

Gutkha consumption, as per this study, has been considered more harmful and injurious to the human body than paan with tobacco. It was found that oral use of smokeless tobacco played a major role in causing cancer of the oral cavity. The various ingredients of a gutkha pouch play different roles in conditions leading to cancer.

The standard ingredients of gutkha are: areca nut, lime, catechu, tobacco, menthol, sandal oil, spices and unspecified flavours. Thus, gutkha has all the ingredients of paan except for the leaf, according to the GCRI study. It says the tobacco content in gutkha is of uncertain quantity and quality.

The GCRI report attributes a finding to National Institute of Occupational Health, Ahmedabad, according to which chemical analysis of five different brands of paan masala plain as well as with tobacco showed the presence of polycyclic armoatic hydrocarbons, nitrosaminites toxic metals such lead, cadmium and nickel and residues of pesticides.

The report says areca nut is a major constituent of paan masala and that several epidemiological studies reveal an association between areca nut consumption and the occurrence of pre-malignant and malignant oral diseases. But it is not the areca nut which makes people go for gutkha. According to the report, the tobacco present in gutkha is one of the major reasons for the addiction observed among the consumers. It concludes after a string of observations from various studies that pan masala has carcinogenic potential and may be causally associated with oral cavity cancers.

The report has also brought to light an important aspect of gutkha when it says that quality of the basic ingredients is also an important factor and fungal infection in tobacco and/or areca nut may affect the ultimate toxicity of the mixture.

It concludes that pan masala has the ability to cause DNA damage among its chewers. Since a long latent period may exist between exposure and manifestation of the disease, the harmful effect of a habit will be observed only after a prolonged period of time, it says.

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The GCRI study suggests that morbidity due to tobacco-related cancers in India is 48 per cent in men and 20 per cent in women with an overall estimate of 33 per cent for both sexes. Paan masala was introduced in the mid-1970s under the pretext of being a safer alternative to smoking because of the opinion against tobacco smoking, the report notes. It said the habit spread among women and children as they generally refrained from smoking and other tobacco habits.

What a pouch contains:

Areca nut 70 to 80

Catechu 10

Lime 1

Unspecified 9 to 19 per cent

Source: GCRI