SMOKING
Cigarettes and e-cigarettes
Everyone knows that smoking can cause lots of diseases, that it can shorten your life by 10 years or more and that the habit can cost a lot of money.
Vaping (smoking e-cigarettes) also has risks. Starting to use e-cigarettes, or switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes, increases your risk of devastating health effects. The safest option is to avoid both vaping and smoking altogether.
Why do teens start smoking?
Teenagers 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 tobacco1 users start before they are 18 years old.
What’s in a cigarette?
There are approximately 600 ingredients in cigarettes, which, when burnt, create more than 7,000 chemicals.1 At least 69 of these chemicals can cause cancer, and many are toxic.
Smoking effects
The consequences of this poisoning happen gradually. Over the long term, smoking causes health problems like heart disease, strokes, emphysema and many types of cancer. People who smoke also have an increased risk of infections like bronchitis and pneumonia. These diseases limit a person’s ability to be normally active, and they can be fatal.
Smoking can also cause fertility problems and can impact sexual health in both men and women. Girls who are on the pill or other hormone-based methods of birth control increase their risk of serious health problems, such as heart attacks, if they smoke.
Nicotine and the other toxins in cigarettes can also affect a person’s body quickly, which means that even smokers can experience problems as: yellowish skin, bad breath, bad-smelling clothes and hair, reduced athletic performance, greater risk of injury and slower healing time and increased risk of illness.
Smoking is a hard habit to break because tobacco contains nicotine, which is highly addictive, so when stopping, it can be helpful to know that the first few days are the hardest.
MORE
1 Tobacco was tirst used as an insecticide in 1763.
DO
1 Use the internet to look
for information about the chemicals contained in tobacco smoke and where these chemicals are also used.