why is smoking bad for your health?

Answer 1

Because it contains ingredients that aren't good for your body. The main ingredients in each cigarette has tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide. Tar is a thick black substance that is dirty and blocks your lungs preventing oxygen to go through. Nicotine makes a cigarette addicting. So, the more you smoke, the more addicting it becomes to the smoker. Nicotine is a stimulant that increases the heart rate and blood pressure - this is partly a sign that the body is trying to absorb more oxygen. Carbon monoxide is a gas produced when you smoke out after inhaling a cigarette. Carbon monoxide prevents the blood carrying oxygen around the body. A heavy smoker’s ability to carry oxygen around the body is reduced by up to 15%. There are actually up to 600 additives and flavourings in each cigarette. But it's nothing compared to the 4000 chemicals released when a cigarette is smoked.

Answer 2

Smoking is the only legal consumer product that kills you when you use it exactly how it's meant to be used! That's pretty scary, isn't it?

Cigarettes are made from tobacco. The tobacco plant is the only plant ever discovered to contain the drug called nicotine. Nicotine is a very strong poison that can kill a human in less than an hour if even a small amount is injected into the blood-stream. Tobacco smoke contains very tiny amounts of nicotine that aren't deadly, but are still very bad for our health..

Tobacco smoke also contains many other chemicals. In fact, it contains over 4,000 chemicals, many of which are very harmful to our bodies. All of these chemicals mix together and form a sticky tar. It's the tar that gives cigarette smoke it's smell and colour. The tar sticks to clothing, skin, and the insides of our lungs!

With the nicotine and tar working together, there are a lot of bad diseases linked to smoking cigarettes. Diseases like throat cancer, mouth cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and heart disease are all caused by smoking. In fact 40,000 Canadians die each year from diseases caused by smoking. Each cigarette you smoke takes 5 to 8 minutes of your life. Is it worth it? The following famous people died from smoking:

Humphrey Bogart (age 57)
Jesse Owens (age 67)
Louis Armstrong (age 71)
Lucille Ball (age 77)
Michael Landon (age 54)
Nat "King" Cole (age 45)
Sammy Davis Jr. (age 64)
Walt Disney (age 65)

People are starving all over the world. If the land used to grow tobacco was used to grow food instead, we could feed another 10 to 20 million people! What do you think is the better thing to grow?

Answer 3

The smoking & the pain when swallowing are NOT connected. You better see a doctor because it might be Acute Tonsillopharyngitis (ATP). Pain when swallowing is the most common symptom of ATP. It can be viral or bacterial. If the doctor see exudates in your throat then it's definitely bacterial. And you need antibiotics because it is caused by a bacteria. As for the smoking I don't think that's too bad. The "significant" smoking is 20-pack years. We compute it by the number of packs of cigarette smoked in a day multiplied by the number of years smoked. If you have a 20-pack year smoking history then you're more prone to develop pulmonary diseases. But would you wait for that? Certainly not. So it's still better to refrain from smoking. I hope this helps. -dennisMD

Answer 4

Lots of good answers here already, but I'll add some that I don't see:

Nicotine is a central nervous system toxin. Did you know that if you have aphids on a plant (small white bugs) that you can empty the tobacco from an unsmoked cigarette into a container, pour boiling water over it, let it steep (like tea), and put the liquid in a spray bottle to use as an insecticide to kill the aphids? It's a well-known natural insecticide. It is a toxin, and it will kill the bugs, because they are small. Think of what that does to the human nervous system over just a year of smoking! A decade! A lifetime! The constant assault creates widespread nerve damage that doesn't heal.

Another effect of smoking is that it is a vaso-constrictor, meaning that it contracts your circulatory system (arteries, veins, and capillaries). This is why it causes high blood pressure, which blows out heart, kidneys, brain, etc., over time. It tightens the blood vessels and the same amount of blood moving through a reduced capacity raises the pressure. The vaso-constriction is also why people who smoke get pale, dry, wrinkly looking skin--the capillaries shrink and cut off the blood supply to the surface of the skin, for one thing, and so the color is diminished, as are the nutrients, so the cells die more quickly. Over time the capillaries become permanently damaged.

Also, this same action in the circulatory system cuts off nutrients and oxygen to the brain by reducing the flow of blood from smoking's effects. Older adults who have smoked thru their lives often begin to see a form of dementia (brain damage of an Alzheimer-type) that is a direct result from smoking's effect on the brain over time.

Also, the effect on the physical environment: Cigarettes contain lead and a host of other things that pollute the air when they are burning. It takes a couple of days for the chemicals to completely break down in the air (like your house, your car, etc.) and they break down into worse things. You can find a chart on the web somewhere that gives this break down and time frame. It's truly frightening to think of the continual pollution cycle of pollution in a home or car, where living things are, with these poisons.

People trapped in a burning building die quickly of smoke inhalation. I think of smoking as killing oneself by the same method, but slowly, over time.

Answer 5

Health depends on what we take in.That is to say it is not only food and drink-stuff including water that should be good.Even the air that we breathe in should be good;When we smoke ,nicotine goes in the lungs and sticks on the walls of lungs.This not only reduces the active area of the lungs but damages the cells too.This may take away the ease of the lung's functioning rendering it diseased-often,God forbid,incurably.That is why smoking is bad for health

Answer 6

Let's look at the top causes of death in the US:

1. Heart disease
2. Cancer
3. Stroke
4. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Smoking dramatically increases your risk of heart disease- it can accelerate the deposition of cholesterol on your coronary arteries and make it more likely to rupture and cause a heart attack or stroke.

The most common form of cancer in the US is lung (for men AND women- yes, it's far more common than breast cancer) Lung cancer can be very deadly, the average survival after diagnosis of a common form of it is 3-4 months.

Over 90% of COPD (chronic bronchitis and emphysema) is caused by smoking. Do you want to spend your days gasping for breath, coughing up gobs and gobs of phlegm every day, struggling to breathe or living on a ventilator? Didn't think so.

And that's not even an inclusive list.

Answer 7

Smoking has loads of poisonous carcinogenic fumes which you inhale and pass on to those around you. It releases carbon monoxide which is taken up more easily than oxygen inside your body, so basically your lungs have to work twice as hard to get oxygen to all your cells and tissues. Cigarettes also have tar in them which paralyze the cells in your windpipe which work by sweeping all the mucus and dirt in your windpipe up and out of your throat. If these cells become paralyzed, such as by smoking, mucus and bacteria remain in the throat and can cause all sorts of nasty breathing problems and infections.
Steer clear my friend, tis very bad for you.

Answer 8

It destroys the cells that protect our lungs from unwanted particles..then reduces the amount of oxygen which is needed for the whole body organs & cells ...so it will reduce the function of our body...
The hot smock is harmful for the teeth & mouth..when they r harmed, digestion would not be done well.
Instead of smoking why not going to gym....work out does the same after a while it relaxes u ,gives u joy as adjusts your blood circulation,your body function,appetite,good shape, enough oxygen for organs,makes your body strong enough against flu & other bronchial problems &............

Answer 9

My Dad had 4 bypass when he had a heart attack. The doctor told him that 80% of the blockages were because of the cigarettes.

Cigarettes are made from tobacco. The tobacco plant is the only plant ever discovered to contain the drug called nicotine. Nicotine is a very strong poison that can kill a human in less than an hour if even a small amount is injected into the blood-stream. Tobacco smoke contains very tiny amounts of nicotine that aren't deadly, but are still very bad for our health.

Tobacco smoke also contains many other chemicals. In fact, it contains over 4,000 chemicals, many of which are very harmful to our bodies. All of these chemicals mix together and form a sticky tar . It's the tar that gives cigarette smoke it's smell and colour. The tar sticks to clothing, skin, and the insides of our lungs!

Tar is very dangerous inside our lungs. It sticks to the cilia in our lungs that are responsible for sweeping out germs and dirt. If the cilia are covered in tar, they can't work right, and germs and dirt can stay in the lungs and cause diseases.

The damage tar does to your cilia is only the beginning, though. The tar and smoke are made up of many chemicals that are known to cause cancer, as well as many chemicals that are just plain bad for you. Just a few of these chemicals are:

Carbon Monoxide Nitrites
Ammonia Nitrosamines
Hydrogen Cyanide Sulfer Compounds
Vinyl Chloride Hydrocarbons
Volatile Alcohols Urethane
Formaldehyde Hydrazine

With the nicotine and tar working together, there are a lot of bad diseases linked to smoking cigarettes. Diseases like throat cancer, mouth cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and heart disease are all caused by smoking.

Each cigarette you smoke takes 5 to 8 minutes of your life. Is it worth it? The following famous people died from smoking:

Humphrey Bogart (age 57)
Jesse Owens (age 67)
Louis Armstrong (age 71)
Lucille Ball (age 77)
Michael Landon (age 54)
Nat "King" Cole (age 45)
Sammy Davis Jr. (age 64)
Walt Disney (age 65)
Unfortunately, even if you don't smoke, you can still get sick from tobacco smoke. If you breathe the smoke from another person's cigarette, it's as bad as if you were smoking the cigarette yourelf! This smoke is called second-hand smoke and it kills hundreds of people each year in Canada. If your parents smoke, you have a greater chance of getting ear infections, asthma, bronchitis, and tonsillitis .

Children who are exposed to smoke all their lives have underdeveloped lungs, and they are two to four times as likely to have allergic reactions and asthma than children of non-smokers.
Second-hand smoke is starting to really bother non-smokers, and that's why there are more places where smoking isn't allowed than there used to be. Now you aren't allowed to smoke on a plane, in a bus, or in many buildings. Non-smokers want to breathe clean air!

Cigarettes aren't just bad for our health. They are bad for the environment, too! Think of the amount of paper that goes into making each cigarette.

Look around outside. There are cigarette butts everywhere! Do you know that it takes more than 5 years for a cigarette butt to biodegrade? That means that it takes at least 5 years for the cigarette butts to break down, unless someone cleans them up. Gross!

Answer 10

It depends on what exactly you are smoking. But any smoke will put a thin layer of tar on your lungs. That is definately a health risk.