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Why, really, is smoking bad for your health?
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What is it in cigarette smoke that’s so bad, and what does it do to you?
There are over 4000 chemical compounds in cigarette smoke. Some are irritants, causing inflammation in every tissue they touch: the vocal cords, windpipe, bronchial tree, and lung sacs. But it doesn’t stop there. When absorbed from the lung sacs into the network of tiny surrounding blood vessels, these inflammatory particles irritate organs all over the body, especially the inner lining of your arteries, triggering the onset of atherosclerosis (hardening and narrowing of the arteries) and eventual heart attack and stroke.
And more. What happens to the lungs? Over time, bronchitis and vulnerability to infection, asthma because the delicate muscle in the bronchial tree goes into spasm, narrowing the air passages, and emphysema because the little air sacs are destroyed, reducing the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with the blood. Together these are called COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. It’s easy to spot the end result: a man or a woman, old or young, in a wheel chair, forever tethered to a small oxygen tank by plastic tubing taped to their nostrils.
Then of course there are the carcinogens, substances that drive the DNA in your cells frantic, disturb their orderly growth and cell repair functions, until they go berserk, reproduce wildly, rapidly, and spread like hot lava streaming down the slopes of a volcano: a cancer, often with metastases (distant spread) before it’s suspected or discovered.
To the unfortunate folks who started when they were in their teens because they thought it was “cool,” and their friends did it, and there were all those glamorous ads on TV and billboards on the highways, knowing why you started, and what it does to you, are the first steps in quitting.
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