Smoking - health risks
You can eat five portions of fruit and veg a day and exercise regularly, but healthy behaviour means little if you continue to smoke.
The message that 'smoking is bad for you' is an old one, so not everyone gives it their full attention. Below we list the health risks of smoking.
Why quit smoking?
Cardiovascular disease causes:
When you inhale, a cigarette burns at 700°C at the tip and around 60°C in the core. This heat breaks down the tobacco to produce various toxins.
As a cigarette burns, the residues are concentrated towards the butt.
The products that are most damaging are:
Major diseases caused by smoking
Hardening of the arteries is a process that develops over years, when cholesterol and other fats deposit in the arteries, leaving them narrow, blocked or rigid. When the arteries narrow (atherosclerosis), blood clots are likely to form.
Smoking accelerates the hardening and narrowing process in your arteries: it starts earlier and blood clots are two to four times more likely.
Cardiovasular disease can take many forms depending on which blood vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in people who smoke.
Cancer
The link between smoking and lung cancer is clear.
For ex-smokers, it takes approximately 15 years before the risk of lung cancer drops to the same as that of a non-smoker.
If you smoke, the risk of contracting mouth cancer is four times higher than for a non-smoker. Cancer can start in many areas of the mouth, with the most common being on or underneath the tongue, or on the lips.
Other types of cancer that are more common in smokers are:
Quitting can help
Other risks caused by smoking
Smoking and impotence
Smoking and others
Babies born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy are twice as likely to be born prematurely and with a low birth weight.
Children who grow up in a home where one or both of their parents smoke have twice the risk of getting asthma and asthmatic bronchitis. They also have a higher risk of developing allergies.
Infants under two years old are more prone to severe respiratory infections and cot death.
For adults, passive smoking seems to increase the risk of lung cancer, but the evidence for an increased risk of heart disease is not yet conclusive.
Thinking about quitting?
Smokers who are trying to kick their habit may be disappointed to find there's no single quit method that guarantees success.
The weight of evidence suggests that smokers should set a date to stop, and do their best to quit completely from this point.
How do cigarettes damage health?
Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances.
The damage caused by smoking is influenced by:
Smoking affects how long you live
Research has shown that smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight years.
Smokers are more likely to get cancer than non-smokers. This is particularly true of lung cancer, throat cancer and mouth cancer, which hardly ever affect non-smokers.
The more cigarettes you smoke in a day, and the longer you've smoked, the higher your risk of lung cancer. Similarly, the risk rises the deeper you inhale and the earlier in life you started smoking.
COPD
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a collective term for a group of conditions that block airflow and make breathing more difficult, such as:
Lung damage from COPD is permanent, but giving up smoking at any stage reduces the rate of decline in lung capacity.
For men in their 30s and 40s, smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) by about 50 per cent.
There are many health-related reasons to give up cigarettes - not just for smokers, but to protect those around you.
As well as reducing your risk of getting a smoking-related illness, there are other benefits to quitting smoking.
Stopping smoking is the single biggest thing you can do to improve your health, but it's a difficult task.
On average it takes four to five attempts to give up, and there are a number of things that can help willpower:
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