What Smoking Does to Your Body and Health
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What Smoking Does to Your Body and Health
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What happens inside you when you light up that cigarette? Basically, very bad things happen. In very little time tobacco smoke can do a great deal of harm. Let’s take a look.
Your Eyes, Nose & Throat: Within seconds of your first drag on a cigarette, noxious gases like formaldehyde, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and the like are produced and begin to irritate the sensitive membranes of your eyes, nose and throat. Your eyes water, your nose runs, and your throat is irritated.
These same gases are the major contributors to smoker’s cough. Smoking causes abnormal thickness in the membranes of the throat closely resembling those that occur in cases of throat cancer.
The Lungs: Continued exposure can bring the lungs’ natural cleansing process to a complete halt.
1. Your lungs are forced to work harder to bring in the same amount of oxygen.
2. Noxious gases like ammonia cause chemical burns to the sensitive tissues of your lungs. This increases the production of mucus, leading to coughing up phlegm.
3. This very excess mucus is a breeding ground for all manner of disease-causing bacteria and viruses, making the smoker at higher risk of colds, flu, bronchitis and respiratory infections.
4. The lining of your bronchi thickens, predisposing you to lung cancer; most cases of lung cancers begin in the bronchial lining.
5. Tobacco smoke damages the scavenger cells that remove foreign particles from the air sacs of the lungs.
6. A layer of sticky tar composed of the compounds inhaled during smoking are deposited on the lining of your throat, the bronchial lining and in the delicate air sacs of your lungs. If you smoke a pack a day you are pouring about 16 ounces of this tar, which is rich in cancer producing chemicals, directly into your lungs each year.
Your Heart: As soon as that first puff of smoke gets to your lungs, your heart begins to work harder. And because of the irritant properties possessed by the nicotine and other chemicals found in tobacco smoke, your heartbeat is more likely to be irregular. As many as 170,000 heart attacks each year can be linked to smoking.
Blood Vessels: Your blood pressure shoots up 10 to 15 percent each time you smoke, placing more stress on your heart and blood vessels and increasing your chances of suffering a heart attack or a stroke. Smoking also carries the risk of Berger’s disease, which cuts off virtually all the circulation in your extremities, requiring amputation in severe cases of the disease.
The Skin: Smoking decreases the amount of oxygen to the skin, due to its constriction action on blood vessels. This deprivation of oxygen leads to premature wrinkling in smokers.
Blood: Carbon monoxide, the deadly gas also found in automobile exhaust, is present in cigarette smoke in an incredibly high concentration – more than 600 times what is considered to be safe in industrial settings. A smoker’s blood typically contains four to fifteen times as much carbon monoxide as that of a nonsmoker.
When you smoke, carbon monoxide passes immediately into your blood, binding to the oxygen receptors sites of your red blood cells. This prevents them from taking up oxygen and means that less oxygen reaches your brain and other vital organs, obviously not a good thing.
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