Cigarette smoking is injurious to health. But, how injurious?
Cigarette smoking is injurious to health ? With tobacco and its products, there are no safe products or safe levels.
If you’ve had 10 cigarettes, you might as well buy yourself 10 more. For there are no safe levels here.
Smoking occasionally or a stick a day, you’d think you’re getting away with it. But menthol or not, “light” or not they’re all costing you way more than you paid for them. You’ll be disappointed to know the products that claim to be a less harmful actually end up damaging more according to studies conducted to verify such claims.
How Cigarette smoking is injurious to health ?
Not many people are aware but nicotine has many health benefits as well. Then how could smoking possibly be a vice?
Nicotine is the most well-known amongst all the 7000 toxic chemicals present in a cigarette. There are lists and paragraphs on the internet that inform you about the wonders that nicotine can do for the body. Most of which are true. Weight loss, control Alzheimer’s, repair body tissues you name it. It could help justify smoking for a while. But the fact is, inhaling it into your lungs through cigarette filters is not safe. It’s like taking your medicine with a sip of poison. Safer sources exist like ‘Transdermal patches’ on the skin that get nicotine into your blood stream or nicotine gums and lozenges. The inhaler or nasal spray will speed up the process but addiction is a risk.
Lungs, I shun thee. But there shouldn’t be a problem with much else.
Everyone knows what smoking does to lungs, to the respiratory system in general. Lung cancer, throat cancer, mouth cancer. We know all that. What isn’t common knowledge is that smoking has more potential for damage. It has been found to affect all the major systems in the body. Did you know that a regular smoker increases his/her chances of having a heart attack by 50%? Also chances of stroke, depression even inability to conceive? Smoking causes your bones to weaken due to insufficient blood supply. Effects that no amount of exercise or diet can undo.
If you think smoking is a way out for coping with stress, you’re mistaken.
People cite plenty of reasons for smoking. Most primarily stress management. A way out of stress is to feel the opposite way, relaxed, maybe a little light-headed. Nicotine travels very fast to the brain and stimulates the pleasure centre to make you feel good for a while. But our body adapts very quickly to nicotine and this “feel good” phase is short-lived. We end up craving more and more of this experience. That nicotine is a highly addictive drug doesn’t help. It is important to remember that this can never be a long term solution to stress. Also, as a result of long term use, you could end up being schizophrenic. Quite opposite of what you were aiming for.
Smoking will kill me. But what if I don’t care?
A growing attitude towards smoking is ignorance. With ease of access to information, the basic dangers of smoking are no longer unknown. So we can only assume that those who still continue are ignorant by choice. “So what if it kills me? Doesn’t matter.” You may have heard this and thought, sure, who am I to judge? But would you think the same if you knew that their habits are deducting time out of your life too? Secondary smoke or the smoke from lit cigarettes claim thousands of lives of non-smokers each year. With a planet of a billion smokers are you sure it isn’t killing you too? Smoker or not, we can no longer afford to be ignorant.
Believe me when I say, the best time to quit smoking is before you’ve lit your first one. An astonishing number of lives are lost each year due to direct and indirect effects of smoking. By practicing this habit we are denying many babies the right to be alive, many more the right to grow old. We really do not owe that much to substances like tobacco that we should keep having to make such huge sacrifices to it. Kill the habit before it kills you.
Also read : The Most Effective Ways To Increase Your Daily Water Consumption
