A new survey indicates that very few smokers know that there is a amount of sugar added to cigarettes.
In addition, very few smokers realize that added sugar increases toxins in cigarette smoke, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Nicotine and Tobacco Research.
Cigarettes contain natural sugar, added to reduce the smell of smoke and facilitate inhalation.
"This also increases the amount of harmful chemicals in smoke and the potential for smoking," said Andrew Seidenberg, a senior researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
"Many of the participants told us they wanted to know more about sugar in cigarettes ... and therefore there is an opportunity to teach people," he told Reuters via e-mail.
Seidenberg and his colleagues surveyed 4350 adult smokers who used them through Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in an online experiment on e-cigarette advertising.
At the end of the experiment participants answered questions about the added sugars in cigarettes: "Is sugar added to cigarettes?" And "Does adding sugar to cigarettes increase toxins in cigarette smoke?" "Before this survey, did you hear this effect of added sugar?"
The researchers found that 5.5 percent of the participants knew about the addition of sugar to cigarettes, while only 3.8 percent knew that added sugar increased toxins in the smoke.
"We were really surprised that almost all participants did not know that sugar was added to the cigarettes," said Seidenberg.
