Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

It's Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, all about Zin.

Researchers Megan Moran and Yohanna Sthrill join me to talk about Zinn. Researchers, Megan Moran and Johannes Thrill join me to talk about

Zin nicotine pouches, what they are and how they work, how they're marketed, and what we know

and don't know about their long-term health effects and whether they could be a viable tool for

helping people to quit tobacco products. Let's listen. Megan Moran and

Johannes Thorel, thank you so much for joining us on public health on call today. We're going to be

talking about Zinn. And so to start us off, what is Zinn? Megan, we'll start with you.

So Zin is a brand of oral nicotine pouch owned by Philip Morris International. It's not the only

brand of oral nicotine out there. It just is, I think, the most popularly used one and the one that's

getting the most immediate attention. So to kind of scope out a little bit, oral nicotine pouches

are these little pouches that contain nicotine powder,

and they're placed between the gum and the lip.

They come in a variety of nicotine strengths and flavors such as citrus, coffee, mint.

What makes these different from other products that might have been similar in the past?

So they're being marketed primarily as being, quote, tobacco-free, which is just another way of

saying that the nicotine in them is synthetically made in a laboratory as opposed to coming

directly from a tobacco leaf. And Johannes, let's talk about what we know about nicotine and health.

...