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Cigars vs Cigarettes

Updated 2026-08-13 · by Eric

Cigarettes and premium cigars are both tobacco and that's roughly where the similarity ends... the evidence puts moderate, non-inhaled cigar smoking in a different risk universe from cigarette smoking. Different does not mean zero, and this page shows its work.

Two products wearing one label

A cigarette is a manufactured product: reconstituted tobacco and stems wrapped in paper, with hundreds of permitted additives... the commonly cited figures run around 600 additives and some 7,000 chemicals in the resulting smoke... engineered for deep lung inhalation, twenty-plus doses a day. A premium handmade cigar is fermented whole tobacco leaf, rolled by hand, containing tobacco and a vegetable-gum seal and nothing else, smoked occasionally, and never inhaled. As of the court rulings covered on the FDA page, that distinction now exists in federal law, not just on cigar forums.

For most of research history, both products got filed under "smoking." That single filing decision is why honest cigar health data is hard to find... and why this page cites what actually exists.

What cigarettes do

No suspense here: cigarette smoking is the most destructive voluntary health habit in America, linked to roughly 480,000 US deaths a year. The 1964 Surgeon General's report found cigarette smokers running about 70 percent higher all-cause mortality and nine to ten times the lung cancer of non-smokers, and sixty years of research since has only sharpened those numbers. Modern cohorts put exclusive cigarette smokers at roughly double the all-cause mortality of people who never used tobacco. I will never smoke a cigarette, and this site will never soft-pedal them.

What the cigar studies actually found

The same 1964 report split cigar smokers into their own column, and here is what it says, verbatim in substance: for men smoking fewer than five cigars a day, death rates were about the same as non-smokers. Five or more daily ran slightly higher... 9 to 27 percent... versus that ~70 percent for cigarettes.

The modern data holds the shape. The JAMA Internal Medicine analysis (2018), 357,000 people: cigar smokers about 20 percent above never-smokers on all-cause mortality, cigarette smokers roughly double... hazard ratios of 1.20 against 1.98. The NEJM Kaiser cohort (1999) followed 17,774 men who never smoked cigarettes and found cigar smokers running higher risks of coronary heart disease (about 27 percent), COPD (about 45 percent), and cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract and lung, with risk climbing alongside daily count and inhalation. And the 2021 Harm Reduction Journal study, which separated groups more carefully than most: men who only ever smoked cigars showed no statistically significant mortality increase on any measure... while cigar smokers who used to smoke cigarettes, or still do, tracked with cigarette smokers.

The fine print that keeps this page honest

Two things the friendly numbers above do not license you to ignore.

Every good number was measured on moderate use, not inhaled. The gradient runs through every study: risk climbs with daily count and climbs sharply with inhalation. The reassuring rows in these tables belong to the one-or-two-a-day-or-less, never-inhaling smoker. How often is too often walks the dose question; are cigars addictive covers the dependence half.

Your cigarette history follows you. If cigarettes were ever your habit, the cigar tables were not built on people like you, and the study that looked hardest found ex-cigarette cigar smokers carrying cigarette-shaped risk. Different product, same lungs remembering.

Where I actually land

I'm not a doctor and this isn't medical advice... it's a guy who read the studies before he ever bought a box, because my wife's first concern was health and she deserved a better answer than "it's fine." What I told her, and what I'd tell you: the moderate, non-inhaled cigar habit is statistically hard to distinguish from not smoking in study after study, the failure modes are all behavioral... frequency, inhaling, a cigarette past... and the thing nobody prices in is what the cigar does for stress, which is its own health input. Weigh it yourself, with your own doctor if that's your situation, against the sources below rather than against a forum's confidence. Don't take my word for it. That's the whole reason the links are there.

Sources

• US Surgeon General (1964). Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee. profiles.nlm.nih.gov
• CDC — Smoking & Tobacco Use, fast facts (cigarette mortality). cdc.gov/tobacco
• Iribarren, C., et al. (1999). Effect of cigar smoking on CVD, COPD, and cancer risk in men. NEJM, 340:1773–1780. nejm.org
• Christensen, C. H., et al. (2018). Cigarette, cigar, and pipe use and mortality risk in the US population. JAMA Internal Medicine, 178(4):469–476. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29459935
• Rodu, B., & Plurphanswat, N. (2021). Mortality among male cigar and cigarette smokers in the USA. Harm Reduction Journal, 18:7. doi.org/10.1186/s12954-020-00446-4
• NCI Monograph 9 (1998). Cigars: Health Effects and Trends (dose and inhalation tables). cancercontrol.cancer.gov
• National Academies (2022). Premium Cigars: Patterns of Use, Marketing, and Health Effects. nationalacademies.org/read/26421

Keep reading

• Do you inhale cigars
• How often is too often
• Are cigars addictive
• The FDA and premium cigars