The Dangers of Smoking

The dangers of smoking are very bad if you did not already know. But do you really know what smoking does to your body? Smoking does harm to just about every single organ in your body. On top of that smoking can cause a vast amount of diseases and reduces your overall health in general.

Smoking will kill you

Check out this nice little fact I found out. That the health effects of cigarettes will kill about 500,000 people this year. That is just about one of every five people that will die this year in the United States will be because of smoking related illnesses.  Also more deaths are from smoking then by HIV, drugs, car accidents, murders and suicide. Not only that, but roll all those up and the number of smoking related deaths will still be higher. They still sell these how?

Do you know what is in these things?

Cigarettes contain over 4000 chemical compounds, of those 4000 chemicals, 400 are toxic.

Here are a few of the 400 deadly chemicals:

Tar – Yes the stuff they use to pave roads.

Acetone – This is found in nail polish remover.

Formaldehyde – yes, the same chemical they used on great grandma.

Arsenic – Rat poison

Lead – Same lead that is used in batteries

That list is just a few of the deadly chemicals. You also can add carbon monoxide, methanol, butane, and of course nicotine.

The major diseases smoking can cause are just as bad. Smokers can look forward to lung, throat and mouth cancer, which hardly ever affect non-smokers. Over ninety percent of lung cancer cases are due to smoking cigarettes. Get this, if no one smoking cigarettes, lung cancer would be very rare. Only 0.5 percent of non-smokers (people who never touched a cigarette) would ever develop lung cancer.

Have you ever heard of COPD? It stands for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This is a collective term for a whole group of conditions that block airflow and make breathing very difficult.  COPD is another disease held mostly by smokers, 80 percent to be exact. The lung damage caused by COPD is permanent; there is no reversing the damage done. However if you quit smoking now it will reduce the decline rate of your lung capacity.

Even though the list of dangers of smoking could go on and on, this is the most serious of them. Is this not reason enough not to quit smoking?

Tags: dangers of smoking, Quit smoking

Category: Why Quit Smoking?