Harmful Health Effects Of Smoking Cigarettes

One in two lifetime smokers will die 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 airways swell 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 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 nonsmokers. 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.

Toxic ingredients in cigarette smoke travel throughout the body, causing damage in several different ways.

Nicotine reaches the brain within 10 seconds after smoke is inhaled. It has been found in every part of the body and in breast milk.

Carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin in red blood cells, preventing affected cells from carrying a full load of oxygen. Cancer-causing agents (carcinogens) in tobacco smoke damage important genes that control the growth of cells, causing them to grow abnormally or to reproduce too rapidly. The carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene binds to cells in the airways and major organs of smokers. Smoking affects the function of the immune system and may increase the risk for respiratory and other infections. There are several likely ways that cigarette smoke does its damage. One is oxidative stress that mutates DNA, promotes atherosclerosis, and leads to chronic lung injury. Oxidative stress is thought to be the general mechanism behind the aging process, contributing to the development of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and COPD. The body produces antioxidants to help repair damaged cells. Smokers have lower levels of antioxidants in their blood than do nonsmokers. Smoking is associated with higher levels of chronic inflammation, another damaging process that may result in oxidative stress.

The pollution caused by cigarettes

Millions of cigarette butts are discarded onto the ground every day They end up in the rivers and lakes where fish and animals eat them by mistake and quite often die from it The rest are left on the ground to decompose which will take an average of 25 years all of the chemicals and additives leach into the ground and pollute the soil and the plants it is a major fire hazard in dry weather, and it is extremely harmful to the environment

Effects of production of cigarettes

tobacco is a very fragile plant and is likely to pick up disease These crops are also often sprayed with a lot of harmful pesticides and chemicals four miles of paper was used an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes One tree is wasted for every three hundred cigarettes produced the energy and water wasted in manufacturing cigarettes that needs to be considered and with soil depletion and chemical wastage added on top of that it becomes clear that manufacturing cigarettes has an enormous strain on the environment