At what age do I need to quit if I want to avoid getting sick later in life?

At what age do I need to quit if I want to avoid getting sick later in life?

Linda Hyder Ferry (Associate Professor, Preventive Medicine and Family Medicine, Loma Linda University School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: Why should I quit smoking?; What are the health benefits of quitting smoking?; What are the immediate health benefits of quitting smoking? and more...

Anytime someone's ready to quit smoking, I'm ready to help them. If they're fifteen, I'm ready to help them, because if you quit smoking as a teenager before you really get addicted to tobacco, you've saved yourself an immense amount of problems. If you've smoked long enough to realize that you're addicted and then you quit, at least you will put to rest the addiction pathway in your brain and not have to keep fighting that later in life. If you progress through your twenties continuing to smoke into your thirties, by the time someone hits their late twenties and their thirties, the risks of having a tobacco related disease start astronomically increasing. My best advice is whatever age you are, quit. If you're under twenty, quit now and avoid a whole lifetime of consequences that are totally preventable. But if you're pushing thirty, thirty is one of the magic marker lines. Once you cross thirty and you're still smoking, you're just waiting. You're going to pay a price, it just depends on how long you want to keep playing that game of Russian roulette. Which cigarette is it that's going to flip the switch for cancer, that's going to put you at risk for critical coronary disease, or that's going to start remarkably change your air function?