Smoking Dangers
What are the dangers of 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?
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.
