Smoking will only affect your wellbeing and you need to quit before it ruins your health and makes your body to shut down.
Smoking can increase ones risk of a variety of problems over several years, some of the bodily effects are immediate.
Smoking harms almost every part of your body and increases risk of many diseases. Smoking also affects how one look, feel and also one’s finances.
Tobacco or Cigarette are harmful chemical that enter the lungs and spread through the body when they are taken.
According to research the smoke reaches the brain, heart and other organs within 10 seconds of first puff and go everywhere the blood flows, harming every part of the body.
Tobacco smoke is incredibly harmful to your health and there is no safe way to smoke even if cigarette is replaced with a cigar, pipe, or hookah it won’t help avoid the health risks.
Cigarettes is said to contain about 600 ingredients, many of which can also be found in cigars and hookahs. When these ingredients burn, they generate more than 7,000 chemicals, according to the American Lung Association. Many of those chemicals are poisonous and at least 69 of them are linked to cancer.
How smoking damages the body
The chemicals in tobacco smoke can damage your body in many ways. For example:
Nicotine narrows the veins and arteries. This can damage the heart by forcing it to work faster and harder and slow the blood and reduce oxygen to the feet and hands.
Carbon monoxide deprives the heart of the oxygen needed to move blood around your body. Over time, the airways swell and let less air into the lungs.
Phenols paralyse and kill the hair-like cells in the airways. These cells sweep clean the lining of the airways and protect them against infections.
Tiny particles in tobacco smoke irritate the throat and lungs and cause ‘smoker’s cough’. This makes them produce more mucus and damages lung tissue.
Cancer-causing chemicals make the cells grow too fast or abnormally. This can result in cancer cells.
Health effects of smoking
If you smoke, you:
- reduce your life expectancy and the quality of life
- increases the risk of many conditions and diseases as well as of dying prematurely.
It can be a long time before smokers get a smoking-related condition or disease. Because of this, some people believe it won’t happen to them.
There is also growing evidence to suggest that smoking has a negative impact on mental health. For example, some studies show that smoking is associated with increased rates of anxiety, panic attacks, depression, suicide attempts and schizophrenia.
Harmful things smoking can cause.
- Cancer: Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells divide out of control and are able to invade other tissues. Cancer cells can spread to other parts of the body through the blood and lymph systems, which help the body get rid of toxins.
There are more than 100 different types of cancer. Most cancers are named for the organ or type of cell in which they start—for example, lung cancer begins in the lung and laryngeal cancer begins in the larynx.
How can smoking cause cancer
Smoking can cause cancer and then block your body from fighting it:4
- Poisons in cigarette smoke can weaken the body’s immune system, making it harder to kill cancer cells. When this happens, cancer cells keep growing without being stopped.
- Poisons in tobacco smoke can damage or change a cell’s DNA. DNA is the cell’s “instruction manual” that controls a cell’s normal growth and function. When DNA is damaged, a cell can begin growing out of control and create a cancer tumor.
- Heart diseases: heart diseases and stroke are cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) diseases. Heart disease includes several types of heart conditions. The most common type in the United States is coronary heart disease (also known as coronary artery disease), it is known for narrowing of the blood vessels that carry blood to the heart.
How can smoking cause heart diseases
- Raise triglycerides (a type of fat in your blood)
- Lower “good” cholesterol (HDL)
- Make blood sticky and more likely to clot, which can block blood flow to the heart and brain
- Damage cells that line the blood vessels
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): This refers to a group of diseases that causes blockage in the airflow of a smoker and breathing-related problems. COPD also includes emphysema; chronic bronchitis; and in some cases, causes asthma.
How can smoking cause COPD
COPD is usually caused by smoking. Smoking accounts for as many as 8 out of 10 COPD-related deaths. However, as many as 1 out of 4 Americans with COPD never smoked cigarettes.
Smoking during childhood and teenage years can slow how lungs grow and develop. This can increase the risk of developing COPD in adulthood.
