Thursday, June 4, 2009

The Effects of Cigarette Smoking

The effects of cigarette smoking are numerous and often deadly.

smokingeffects When you inhale cigarette smoke you are ingesting over 3,000 chemicals, hundreds of which are deadly. These toxic poisons include tobacco-specific nitrosamines (potent carcinogens), benzene (found in pesticides and gasoline), formaldehyde (a chemical used to preserve dead bodies), arsenic (rat poison), carbon monoxide (auto exhaust fumes) and hydrogen cyanide (a favorite in Nazi concentration camps).


Many people believe that lung cancer and emphysema are the most common effects of cigarette smoking but the blue ribbon actually goes to heart disease. Heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US and the #1 killer of smokers. Researchers report that among smokers there were 1.6 million heart disease related deaths worldwide in 2000; compare that to 85,000 deaths from lung cancer.
If those two gruesome effects of cigarette smoking are no enough to get you slapping on a nicotine patch consider a few others:


Stroke: a stroke is the effect of a part of the brain loosing life-giving oxygen caused by the rupture or blockage of a blood vessel. Imagine the part of your brain that controls speech gets deprived of food and starts dying; suddenly you can’t talk, only babble incoherently. Diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking are the three leading risk factors for stroke.


Cancer: in addition to lung cancer smoking greatly increases the risk of cancer of the mouth, lips, tongue (I had a smoker friend who lost his tongue!) and esophagus.


Emphysema: your lungs are full of little sacks that fill with air when you breathe and deliver oxygen to the blood stream. Emphysema happens when those sacs enlarge and rupture causing carbon monoxide to build up and make it difficult to inhale and exhale. Grab a straw, stick it in your mouth and try breathing through it. Gets kind of tedious after a few inhalations, doesn’t it? Now imagine the straw getting narrower and narrower to the point that you suffocate…


Those are just a few of the effects of cigarette smoking.

Others that everyone around you knows (but won’t tell you) is that your hair, fingers, breath and clothes stink; so do those nasty ashtrays you leave laying around. You get more colds and flu, your teeth are yellow and you can’t walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for breath.


But you knew all of this, didn’t you? When you think about it you wish you could quit but you’re afraid to try because “everyone knows how hard it is to quit smoking,” right? Not me; it was easy for me to quit smoking and it can be for you, too. Click Here! when you're ready to quit.



As Featured On EzineArticles

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