SMOKING
WARM UP
Do you smoke? If so, when did you start? Does anybody smoke in your family?
Cigarettes and e-cigarettes
Smoking is a bad habit because it may cause lots of diseases, shorten your life and 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 smoking and vaping altogether.
Why do teens start smoking?
Teenagers start smoking for a variety of 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 are 18 years old.
What’s in a cigarette?
There are approximately 600 ingredients in cigarettes, which, when burnt, create more than 7,000 chemicals1. 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 problems1 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, which means that teen smokers will rapidly experience problems such as: yellowish skin, bad breath, 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. When stopping, it can be helpful to know that the first few days are the hardest, so knowing that may help quitting.
DO
1 Do you know what chemicals are contained in tobacco smoke? If not, surf the net to get information.
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1 According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tobacco smoke is the second leading cause of death in the world and the leading cause of avoidable death. The WHO estimates that more than 8 million people die from tobacco use every year worldwide.