Smoking Dangers

What are the dangers of smoking?

Human beings that use tobacco on a regular basis have the number one risk from smoking, and that is damage to their own physiology. I'll go through a list of those. The second risk of smoking is what happens when that cigarette that's lit puts something else on fire. Fires throughout the world caused by cigarettes have a significant loss of life that many people don't really consider, and loss of property. So, if you come back to the initial smoker, the one who makes the choice to light the cigarette and use this product to deliver smoke to their body so they can get nicotine to their brain to feel good, the consequences are, starting where it first goes in: lip cancer, tongue cancer, mouth cancer, throat cancer, stomache cancer. The list of cancers is about sixty. Sixty different cancers in the human body are increased in someone who chooses to use tobacco. The number one of all the cancers is lung cancer. The heavier of smoker you are, the higher rate of lung cancer. The second organ that's affected once it goes into the airways, into the lungs, it gets pumped right to the heart. The heart is significantly affected. Heart attack rates are higher. Chronic obstructive lung disease is number three. Emphysema and bronchitis, meaning you can no longer exchange gas, and you eventually end up on oxygen. That is primarily eighty-five to ninety percent a tobacco-related disorder. In fact, half of all diseases that pulmonologists see are just because people chose to smoke until it makes them sick. All preventable! Other forms of disease include constriction of the arteries. We call that peripheral vascular disease, meaning people get strokes, people lose the function of their kidneys, they have to have their feet or their legs cut off because they don't get enough blood supply because their arteries become too small to transmit enough oxygen. And when you add all of that together, what we know is that one out of every two smokers who smoke through their adult life die prematurely of a tobacco-related illness. Preventable! Fifty percent of adult smokers are going to have a consequence of smoking that's going to end their life before it normally would have. The other half that are still alive and didn't die prematurely, die miserably because they have emphysema, or their heart doesn't work and they have congestive failure, or they've had a stroke. It's not a pleasant thing to live a life with cigarette smoking.

Is it true smoking leads to premature aging?

One of the most interesting responses that I get from people who want to quit smoking, when I tell them, if you quit smoking now, you will no longer have the advanced changes to your skin with wrinkling, due to the oxygen levels being diminished from carbon monoxide in your skin and not being able to fight off all of the damage of the sun. The constriction to your blood vessels means that not much oxygen that you even have is being carried to fight off all the free radical changes that occur with sun exposure, and because of the fact that skin cancer itself is higher in smokers. Not even just wrinkling but damage to your skin, in general, is a natural consequence of smoking. When they take pictures - and I show this to my smokers - of someone who has never smoked, and then share a picture of someone who has been a lifetime smoker, you will often guess that those people have 10, 15 or 20 years difference in age when actually they are the same age. Dermatologic research has shown unequivocally that cigarette smoking, because of the physiology of what it does to someone's skin - depriving it of oxygen, depriving it of its vascular supply - prematurely ages skin. When you stop smoking, that premature aging ends at that point. With good cleaning and good care and protection from the sun, it shouldn't continue to progress at that same rate to advanced wrinkling and damage to the skin from radiation from the sun.

How does smoking affect my sex life?

Some people think that a cigarette after sex actually enhances the pleasure. The reality is that it does. Sexual orgasm release is wired through your pleasure and reward centre to release dopamine to feel good. It's the most intense natural response of the human reward centre. Nicotine boosts that, and so a cigarette after sex really does feel better than a cigarette by itself. However, there are prices that you pay for cigarette smoking. Blood vessels are constricted by cigarette smoking, and over time the lining of the arteries are hardened so that they can no longer dilate and constrict, and that's the whole mechanism of a male erection and female erection. I would encourage people who are starting to have erection problems, to first go talk to their doctor about quitting smoking. That's much safer and cheaper in the long run than continuing to smoke and just taking medications or having surgery, or other ways to try and correct impotence.

If I smoke, will I die?

There is a very high likelihood that someone who chooses to smoke through their adult life will pay the price of a premature tobacco related death. How high a price? The reality is one out of every two smokers - 50 percent - are going to pay the price dying 5, 10, 15, maybe 40 years before they would otherwise have died. Especially men who have other risk for heart disease. That heart attack could occur in your forties, not your eighties. That chops off a huge portion of your life. Is everyone going to die of a tobacco related illness? Of course not. But if you talk to your doctor about what your risks are of the common causes of death caused by tobacco and related to tobacco use, I would encourage you to make a decision to weigh carefully what those risks mean to you and why you smoke, what you like about it and what price it would be to give it up. Actually, it's not so difficult to stop smoking if you get professional help before tobacco puts an end to your life.

How deadly is smoking?

The number one preventable cause of death, meaning someone wouldn't need to die of this, is tobacco. Because of the increasing rate in certain countries of smoking, especially in women, this rate is going to increase. So this is a huge global problem, it's greater than suicide, combined with homicides, combined with HIV and AIDS, and combined with motor vehicle accidents. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, if you put all, alcoholism, chemical dependency, you put all of those deaths together, tobacco still kills more people than all of them. It kills 40 percent of people with heart disease. It is the number one cause of cancer. It is causing 80 to 90 percent of lung disease from emphazema and bronchitis, asthma deaths, you just go on and on down the ten and fifteen most common causes of death and tobacco is related to almost all of them. Does cigarettes promote other risk factors? Yes, in fact when you combine it with diabetes or hypercholesterolemia or hypertension, you put all those risks together, tobacco's like lighting the match to set the fuse for premature death. So it's not doing it just by itself. It's doing it because of lifestyle disorders and risk factors that really are adding up to a huge burden of death in the western world and in developing countries.

How many chemicals are in cigarettes?

If you looked at a cigarette wrapped up in paper, basically, you've got lots of added chemicals, flavors, tobacco leaves, a little wrapping paper on the outside, and a cotton filter. But, when you light that cigarette, it turns into combustion with tar and all sorts of other heated elements that create up to 4,800 chemicals in every puff on a cigarette.

Is smoking the only cause of lung cancer?

Lung cancer, as a broad topic, involves every cell type that makes up the lung. There are several categories of types of lung cancer. There is one type of lung cancer that is specifically, and almost only, related to cigarette smoking. That is called broncogenic carcinoma, meaning cells that originate from the lining of the lungs. That's because that's where all the toxin, and the heat, and the tar particles primarily get into the lungs, through the main airways. So, broncogenic carcinoma is almost entirely related to cigarette smoking. There are other types of lung cancer that people can get from other carcinogenic chemicals, exposures, asbestos, etc. The interesting thing is, if you have another risk in your life from another cancer producing agent in your lungs, and you smoke, you multiply that. So, I know someone who had lung cancer and they never smoked, well of course, other cells in the lungs can go wrong, and can develop cancer. People are exposed to other cancer producing agents, but cigarette smoking makes all of them worse and has its own unique way of destroying the cells in the lung, and flipping that switch to where they begin to become out of control growth cells, which is all cancer is.