The standard answer from a doctor is simply never have a single cigarette. Never bring your phone to bed, never have unprotected sex, never sit for eight hours at a time. Never is the directive for a lot of things that a lot of people will do more times than never.

This is a new reader-question-and-answer column that focuses on social determinants of health, and how we assess risk and make decisions. Cigarette filters are an interesting place to start because they were created and sold as a mind game. A mind game of death. I’ll start by saying clearly that no amount of inhaled smoke in any form is advisable. But the interesting thing is that smoking filtered cigarettes could actually be worse than smoking unfiltered.

“As people switch to cigarettes that have more holes, they take bigger puffs, longer puffs, and they smoke more cigarettes per day,” Shields explained to me. “So the way it works is, the old-style cigarettes had about 10 percent ventilation. And light cigarettes had about 20 percent, and then ultralight cigarettes had anywhere between 50 and 70 percent. Our view is that those 10 percent ventilation-rate cigarettes are probably more dangerous than zero percent.”

Read the source article at The Atlantic