Smoking Cessation Benefits
If you are a smoker, apart from being chastised at every opportunity by the anti-smoking police, you will no doubt be aware that smoking is bad for your health. So why are the smoking nazis always being so down on you? Why do they want you to quit? The answers lie in the smoking cessation benefits that come from quitting the evil weed. Smoking os so bad for your health it beggars belief.
Rather than thinking in terms of smoking cessation benefits, I want to look at the downsides of smoking in terms of your health. The bad stuff that cigarettes are doing to you comes to a stop when you quit.
Smoking Cessation Benefit #1: Reduced risk of cancer
When you smoke, you are literally ingesting cancer-causing (carcinogenic) substances all the time you inhale. The carcinogens are absorbed into your blood stream and stick to every surface of your body they come into contact with.
Overtime, these carcinogens cause cell damage and help to mutate the DNA in your cells. Most of the time your body can deal with it but smokers assault themselves with these carcinogens for years and years. Eventually your body becomes overwhelmed and somewhere, there is a good chance of you developing cancer.
Of course, the main area you are likely to contract cancer is in your lungs but all of your mouth, tongue, nose, throat, larynx, and oesophagus are at increased risk. Smokers also have higher risks of virtually all forms of cancer, but these risks start subsiding the minute you stop smoking.
Smoking Cessation Benefit #2: Reduced risk of COPD
Another major disease caused by smoking is collectively known as COPD which stands for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. For you and me that means long term damage to lung function disease.
The two main variations of COPD that you need to be aware of are Emphysema and Bronchitis.
Emphysema is a disease where the lung tissue stops being elastic and spongy, becoming inflexible and ineffective at doing its job. In simple terms, emphysema suffocates you to death because your lungs stop being lungs and instead become stagnant bags of air in your chest! It is very unpleasant and afflicts about 18,000 Americans per year.
Bronchitis is the long term inflammation of the bronchioles which obstructs the lungs ability to transfer air from the outside of you to the inside of you. This restriction reduces the effectiveness of the lungs and makes it difficult to breath.
Most smokers suffer from very mild bronchitis caused by the irritation of inhaling hot toxic smoke into the lungs every hour or so. This manifests in wheezing and the smoker’s cough where the smoker expels the excess mucus produced in response to this irritation.
Smoking Cessation Benefit #3: Reduced risk of heart disease
Smoking causes many physiological changes in the body both on a short term and long term basis. One of the things that it does is harden your arteries and raise your blood pressure. This in turn makes it harder for your heart to pump blood around your body. As a result, your heart works harder and becomes enlarged.
Further to this, the high pressure puts more stress on the aorta and other arteries around the body. The combined effect of the increased stress on your entire cardiovascular system means you are much more likely to suffer from heart disease and probable heart attack.
Smoking Cessation Benefit #4: Reduced risk of stroke
Smokers run a much higher chance of having a stroke, particularly in later life. The reasons for this are not clear but it is thought that the same processes in smokers that lead to hardening of arteries are linked.
Your chance of suffering a stroke doubles every decade after the age of 55 but smokers run an elevated risk of between twice and four times that as non-smokers. Smokers with high blood pressure run a twenty fold higher risk of stroke compared to non-high blood pressure non-smokers.
Smoking cessation benefits are numerous and I have mentioned just a few here. Whatever you do, quitting smoking is undoubtedly the most beneficial thing you can do to benefit your health bar none!
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