Avoid Smoking Coz its Shortens Your Life

People start smoking for a variety of different reasons. Some think it looks cool. Others start because their family members or friends smoke. Statistics show that about 9 out of 10 tobacco users start before they're 18 years old. Most adults who started smoking in their teens never expected to become addicted. That's why people say it's just so much easier to not start smoking at all.

• Every year hundreds of thousands of........

•  people around the world die from diseases caused by smoking cigarettes - Smoking KILLS.
• One in two lifetime smokers willdie from their habit. Half of these deaths will occur in middle age.
• Tobacco smoke also contributes to a number of cancers.
• The mixture of nicotine and carbon monoxide in each cigarette you smoke temporarily increases your heart rate and blood pressure,straining your heart and blood vessels.
• This can cause heart attacks and stroke. It slows your blood flow, cutting off oxygen to your feet and hands. Some smokers end up having their limbs 
  amputated.
• Tar coats your lungs like soot in a chimney and causes cancer. A 20-a-day smoker breathes in up to a full cup (210 g) of tar in a year.
• Changing to low-tar cigarettes does not help because smokers usually take deeper puffs and hold the smoke in for longer, dragging the tar deeper into their lungs.
• Carbon monoxide robs your muscles, brain and body tissue of oxygen, making your whole body and especially your heart work harder. Over time, your airwaysswell up and let less air into your lungs.
• Smoking causes disease and is a slow way to die. The strain of smoking effects on the body often causes years of suffering.
• Emphysema for example is an illness that slowly rots your lungs. People with emphysema often get bronchitis again and again, and suffer lung and heart failure.
• Lung cancer from smoking is caused by the tar in tobacco smoke.
• Men who smoke are ten times more likely to die from lung cancer than non-smokers.
• Heart disease and strokes are also more common among smokers than non-smokers.
• Smoking causes fat deposits to narrow and block blood vessels which leads to heart attack.
• Smoking causes around one in five deaths from heart disease.
• In younger people, three out of four deaths from heart disease are due to smoking
• Cigarette smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of low birth weight, prematurity, spontaneous abortion, and perinatal mortality in humans, which has been referred to as the fetal tobacco syndrome.

As mentioned earlier, this list can only begin to convey some of the long and short term effects of smoking cigarettes. We know that smoking kills and that quitting makes sense but what about the the effect on others?

We consider reasons why smoking is bad for those around you next, in the effects of second hand smoke.

The harmful effects of smoking on the body and overall health of smokers presented in the list below, only begins to convey some of the short and long term side effects of smoking cigarettes.

Quitting makes sense for many reasons but simply put: smoking kills and the effects of second hand smoke are also bad for the health of those around you.

Cigarette smoke contains about 4,000 different chemicals which can damage the cells and systems of the human body. These include at least 80 chemicals that can cause cancer (including tar, arsenic, benzene, cadmium and formaldehyde) nicotine (a highly addictive chemical which hooks a smoker into their habit) and hundreds of other poisons such as cyanide, carbon monoxide and ammonia.

Every time a smoker inhales, these chemicals are drawn into the body where they interfere with cell function and cause problems ranging from cell death to genetic changes which lead to cancer.

This is why tobacco smoking is a known or probable cause of approximately 25 diseases. According to WHO figures, smoking is responsible for approximately five million deaths worldwide every year. However it also contributes to, or aggravates many other diseases and may play a part in many more deaths. Even the WHO says that its impact on world health isn’t fully assessed.

WHO says smoking is a greater cause of death and disability than any single disease. By 2020, the WHO expects the worldwide death toll to reach 10 million, causing 17.7 per cent of all deaths in developed countries.

There are believed to be 1.1 billion smokers in the world, 800 million of them in developing countries.

People take up smoking for a variety of reasons. Young people are especially vulnerable because of pressure from their peers and the image that smoking is clever, cool or 'grown-up'. Just trying a few cigarettes can be enough to become addicted.

Many people say that smoking helps them to feel more relaxed or cope with stress but nicotine is a stimulant not a relaxant, so it doesn’t help stress. What people are describing is more likely to be relief from their craving or withdrawal symptoms.

There are hundreds of examples and volumes of research showing how cigarette smoking damages the body. For example, UK studies show that smokers in their 30s and 40s are five times more likely to have a heart attack than non-smokers.

Smoking contributes to coronary artery disease (atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries) where the heart’s blood supply becomes narrowed or blocked, starving the heart muscle of vital nutrients and oxygen, resulting in a heart attack. As a result smokers have a greatly increased risk of needing complex and risky heart bypass surgery. Smoking also increases the risk of having a stroke, because of damage to the heart and arteries to the brain.

If you smoke for a lifetime, there is a 50 per cent chance that your eventual death will be smoking-related - half of all these deaths will be in middle age.

Smoking does enormous damage to the lungs, especially because these tissues are in the direct firing line for the poisons in smoke. As a result there is a huge increase in the risk of lung cancer, which kills more than 20,000 people in the UK every year.

US studies have shown that men who smoke increase their chances of dying from the disease by more than 22 times.

Women who smoke increase this risk by nearly 12 times.

Lung cancer is a difficult cancer to treat - long term survival rates are poor. Smoking also increases the risk of the following cancers:

• Oral
• Uterine
• Liver
• Kidney
• Bladder
• Stomach
• Cervical
• Leukemia

Even more common among smokers is a group of lung conditions called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD which encompasses chronic bronchitis and emphysema. These conditions cause progressive and irreversible lung damage, and make it increasingly difficult for a person to breathe.