I am at day 123. Although I never joined a quit group I do like to poke around the site.
A topic I have always wondered about but haven't seen much about - does dipping cause gastrointestinal problems?
It seemed to give me frequent heartburn and acid indigestion. It also made me poop at least twice as often. I swear I could throw in an after dinner dip and be on the toilet before I finished the chew. It is hard for me to isolate the chew as the cause since I was doing it for 25 years. But I am pretty sure I got immediate relief of these issues from quitting. But everything is so cloudy and unfortunately my drinking and diet have become worse since quitting
Nicotine is a stimulant and can act as a stimulant on the digestive system (IE a laxative).
I can tell you from personal experience that my acid reflux / GERD actually got WAY worse for a few weeks (months?) after I quit, but then subsided. It got better to the point that I no longer take any of my acid reflux meds (I was on Prilosec and Nexium as well as a slew of OTC stuff).
These days I rarely if ever get any sort of acid reflux and that's only cause I've eaten (or drank) way too much and a Tums (or something similar) will generally take care of it).
That's not even delving into the issues of swallowing dip spit. Even if you didn't "gut it" you were still ingesting trace amounts of nicotine laced saliva. We recently lost one of our own - traumagnet - who was a "gutter". He felt till his dying days that his cancer was due to swallowing all those years. (RIP Todd
http://blog.killthecan.org/2016/08/rest ... raumagnet/ )
Probably more than you were looking for... to answer your question more succinctly: "Does dipping cause gastrointestinal problems?"
I'd say unequivocally "yes".
Chewie
