Why Cigarette Smoking is Bad for Your Health
Why Cigarette Smoking is Bad for Your Health
Cigarette Smoking is directly responsible for 419,000 deaths from all causes in the United States. Smoking accounts for 30 percent of all deaths from cancer and 30 percent of all cardiovascular deaths.
Tobacco smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, 60 of which are carcinogenic (capable of producing cancer). Two of the most noxious of these are nicotine and carbon monoxide.
Nicotine is an addictive, stimulant drug that releases chemicals that raise the heart rate, blood pressure, and resting and physical-activity metabolism. Carbon monoxide, the same gas that is emitted from the exhaust of automobiles, trucks, and buses, is a poisonous gas that competes with oxygen for binding sites on hemoglobin.
Hemoglobin (a protein pigment transported by red blood cells that attaches to and carries oxygen) has a much greater affinity for carbon monoxide than it has for oxygen. As a result, there is a proportional decrease in oxygen that is displaced by carbon monoxide. This is a significant problem that is further complicated by the fact that carbon monoxide has a half-life of 5 hours after it attaches to hemoglobin. By comparison, oxygen detaches from hemoglobin in just a matter of minutes.
An increased level of carbon monoxide combined with nicotine act in concert to reduce HDL-cholesterol, to increase blood platelet adhesiveness (which increases the likelihood of arterial spasms), to increase fibrinogen (which increases the probability of clot formation), and increases levels of homocysteine (a protein that increases the risk of having a heart attack). These factors, individually or together, predispose people prematurely to coronary heart disease. The answer is: Stop smoking or, better yet, don’t start.
Passive Smoke and Smokeless Tobacco Products
Passive smoke (also called involuntary, secondhand, or environmental smoking) involves inhaling the smoke of others. Those who breathe secondhand smoke have increased risk of premature illness and death. Estimates show that 35,000 to 60,000 nonsmokers die annually of heart disease because of exposure to secondhand smoke, and another 3,000 die of lung cancer.
Inhaling secondhand smoke has a dose-response relationship with developing smoking-related illnesses. The greater the exposure, the greater is the risk. Children of smoking parents have a higher incidence of influenza, bronchitis, asthma, pneumonia, and the common cold.
In recent years smokeless tobacco products (chews, plugs, and dips) have become increasingly popular with high school and college males. These products pose another threat. Nicotine is just as addictive and just as harmful when it is delivered through the oral cavity as it is when delivered through the lungs. The effects of carbon monoxide are eliminated from smokeless tobacco products because these are not combustible, but users of smokeless tobacco trade less risk of lung cancer for greater risk of oral cancer. The incidence of oral cancer is 50 times higher among users than among nonusers.
Tobacco use is an extremely difficult habit to break. Success requires overcoming the addiction to nicotine while simultaneously dealing with the psychological dependence. The latter might be more of a challenge than the former. The person overcomes the nicotine addiction within the first couple of weeks after quitting, but the psychological and social cues remain for years. Breaking this dependence requires reeducation and changes in behavior.
Stop-smoking approaches include professional counseling, nicotine patches, nicotine chewing gum, hypnosis, artificial cigarettes, acupuncture, and aversive conditioning. The 1 -year success rates for these techniques range from 10 percent to 40 percent. Millions of Americans have quit smoking. The number of adult smokers today is half that of the 1960s.
Exercise offers another option. When people get hooked on the exercise habit, they often disconnect from the smoking habit. Smoking is a drawback to exercise performance, and it limits the health gains that can be achieved with exercise.