Recent studies continue to support the idea that nicotine pouches pose a lower risk compared to conventional tobacco products.
The outcomes of the multi-year, three-part research program add to the extensive body of research on nicotine pouch products, contributing to the understanding of the real-world health effects of such products.
The widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches has aided countries like Sweden in reducing smoking rates from 16.5% in 2004 to 5.8% today, making it the country with the lowest smoking prevalence in the EU and one of the lowest globally.
Elaine Round, the Group Head of Life Sciences at BAT, stated: “If we are committed to creating a world without smoking, we must ensure that we continue to develop leading-edge scientific evidence to demonstrate the potential of our products to be less harmful.
This research marks another significant milestone for the nicotine pouch category, adding to the substantial data that already supports our belief that less harmful*† products like Velo can be crucial in providing smokers with satisfying, complete alternatives to continued cigarette use.
Especially encouraging are the findings that the addition of specific flavors and a range of nicotine strengths did not heighten measures of cytotoxicity, given the significant role these product features can play in offering adult smokers viable alternatives.”
The first study (Bishop et al 2020) introduced a method for creating extracts of tobacco and nicotine products for in vitro testing and evaluated BAT’s Velo (then known as Lyft) against both a reference cigarette and a comparable snus product. The results supported the category of nicotine pouches, and Velo in particular, as being less harmful
The second study (East et al 2021) utilized the aforementioned method to test a variety of Velo flavors and nicotine strengths in both lung cell cultures and an oral cell model that mimics the human body, revealing limited toxicity across the product variants tested. This demonstrated that the flavors and nicotine strengths studied do not exacerbate measures of cytotoxicity for the Velo products.
The third study (Yu et al 2024) examined a selection of Velo products from the previous study using both traditional and modern tests for DNA damage and mutations, as well as assessing inflammation, and once again showed minimal reactions compared to a reference snus product. Consequently, this study further substantiated the less harmful profile of Velo.
