Smoking is a costly habit whichever way you look at it. Not only does it hit your pocket, it takes a heavy toll on your body and the health of those around you. Every puff on a cigarette draws poisonous gases into your lungs. From your lungs, carcinogens get absorbed into the bloodstream and are spread to every part of your body. Cigarettes may look innocuous enough, neatly wrapped in white paper, but they’re known to release some 4,000 chemicals when they burn. These include an array of polyaromatics, arsenic, formaldehyde, Polonium-210 and cadmium, which is usually found in batteries. Carbon monoxide, as emitted by car exhausts, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide – popular in pesticides – are a few more poisons introduced to your heart and lungs with every puff.
Many smokers may not know, or want to know, what exactly they’re sucking into their lungs when they light up, but most will have heard about tar. Tar is the mixture of chemicals in the solid particles that are inhaled into the body and then settle to form a sticky residue, outwardly visible on teeth and fingers, but just as present within the lungs. The average smoker inhales approximately one coffee cup full of black toxic tar each year. Chemicals like carbon monoxide, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide undermine the ability of your lungs to clear away toxins so that other chemicals, viruses and bacteria you inhale naturally are not expelled. Polonium-210 is radioactive, and subjects cells in your lungs to higher doses of radiation than they would normally experience. As for your heart, hydrogen cyanide and arsenic can cause harm to cells in your heart and its blood vessels, while compounds like nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide found in cigarettes, mean lower amounts of life-giving oxygen is carried by the blood to your other organs. Whilst smoking is deadly enough, passive smoking is also a big risk. Studies by Cancer Research UK show that passive smoking can increase the non-smoker’s chances of developing lung cancer by 25%. Their research also shows that around 11,000 people die every year from lung cancer, strokes and heart disease brought on by passive smoking.
A recent survey carried out by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), shows that the number of people using electronic cigarettes has trebled in the last two years, from 700,000 in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014 providing one of the greatest potential benefits to public health in a generation.
Head of tobacco policy at Cancer Research UK, Alison Cox, said that the rapid rise in e-cigarette use reflected the fact that most smokers wanted to quit their smoking habit. See www.cancerresearchuk.org for more information on cancer, the effects of smoking and tips on quitting. We also have some information on quitting smoking here.