My dentist has been peddling this procedure to me for years. It sounds incredibly invasive and painful and they don’t even promise it’ll cover 100% of the recession, nor that it won’t recede again unless one goes for an even more invasive jaw realignment which involves, I shit you not, intentionally fracturing the palate bone to make more space to align the teeth.

That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.

(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)

I had to do a graft and it wasn’t especially painful. I got painkillers but only used them on the first day.

The recovery period sucked, I needed antibiotics and couldn’t eat anything solid for two weeks.

If you can behaviourally prevent needing gum grafts you should.

Spitting was necessary because swallowing tobacco represents an immediate, acute food poisoning issue due to the other chemicals present. It's also all sorts of cancerous, including to the mouth, also due to those other chemicals.

We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.

These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.

> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.

Again, maybe not where you are, but there are definitively countries where both adults and children have tabacco under their lip for most of their waking hours, with no spitting or exhalation involved, as they're inside school/offices, can't really just spit there, even the non-synthetic stuff, as that's relatively new.

Zyn is specifically synthetic isn't it? You still seem to be mostly focused on synthetic nicotine, but the same behavior been observed for many, many decades with non-synthetics too.

> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.

Swedish Snus has been around a long time, isn't linked to cancer at all, and has no bad effect on your teeth and gums. Snus is actually associated with vast drops in cancer rates, because it usually replaces smoking. Snus is also no-spit - I think the difference between it and chewing tobaccos is that they are roasted and that snus is steamed. Makes a huge difference healthwise.

I don't have anything to say about the synthetic stuff, I'm not familiar. It's a bizarre industry that cropped up during a period where snus was trying to get into the market and the tobacco companies were trying to keep them out.

Somehow, cigarette companies lobbied to get snus caught up in cigarette taxes, even without the actual health risk. They were only even required to put the weakest possible warning on the package, because the health effects of snus have been well-studied and they're not associated with anything serious, except for nicotine addiction itself (which makes it a good substitute for smoking.)

The big US cigarette companies marketed a few horrible "snus" lines, with the marketing and goal that they would be a replacement product for when a smoker couldn't take a smoke break, and they were weak. I assume these synthetic lines developed to avoid taxes in some way by pretending to be a sort of medical product rather than a tobacco product, like a nicotine gum.

Snus is actually a better Nicorette, I suspected that the nicotene replacement industry had something to do with the sabotage of snus. Snus is cheap, free of health consequences, and doesn't lead you to associate something as addictive as chewing with nicotine consumption. Snus just quietly sits behind your lip, the minis are undetectable by the people you're interacting with, and they smell nice so they don't ruin your breath. Why would you choose a more expensive synthetic alternative?

Zyn has been around for well over 10 years. We would be seeing this gut thing you talk of by now I would think.

Exactly what I'm talking about, just didn't want to name it by name as people have a lot of preconceived notions about it that pops up as soon as you say "snus", for some reason.

> You customarily spit out that saliva that’s been in contact with your dip

I don't think this is necessarily true everywhere/for everyone, it's really not common in Sweden to walk around spitting just because you have tobacco under your lip, as people sit in offices and stuff with this in their mouth, can't really go around a spit indoors.

Those problems are because of the tobacco. Zyn packets et al are just nicotine, and nicotine itself has not been shown to be a carcinogen.