What are the health hazards of tobacco?

What are the health hazards of tobacco? About harmful substances and passive smoking.

Cigarettes are something you always want to smoke when you wake up from bed or after eating. Although many people smoke as a recreational item, they may actually become addicted to nicotine. In that case, you are not enjoying the cigarette voluntarily, but are being forced to smoke by the nicotine.

The more you smoke, the more it harms your body, and in some cases, it can cause more harm to your family and people around you than yourself, so you need to stop smoking as soon as possible. In recent years, smoking using heated tobacco products has become common, but there are still many unknowns regarding its safety.

This time, we will explain the harmful effects of cigarettes and heated tobacco. Smoking causes no harm and no benefit.

Alcohol is also said to be the ``chief of medicines,'' and it is said that if consumed in moderation, it can have the effect of promoting health. On the other hand, what about tobacco? Cigarettes are ``all harm and no good.'' There is nothing good about it, only bad things.

When I say things like this, some people argue, saying, ``That's not true! Smoking cigarettes relaxes your mind, puts your mind at ease, and clears your head, making it easier to come up with good ideas.'' However, these phenomena are simply due to the elimination of nicotine withdrawal symptoms caused by smoking and the recovery (normalization) of decreased cerebral function. Some may say, ``Even so, cigarettes have become a tool to promote friendship in communication between smokers. Even if we were to put aside the debate about the essence of friendship and count it as one benefit, the few benefits would be buried by the many strong disadvantages (harms) that outweigh the benefits.

Furthermore, in reality, the harm caused by tobacco is far from 100,000 including indirect harm, and many of these harms can even take our lives. The more you learn about the harmful effects of tobacco, the more you will understand the validity of the expression, ``All harm, no good.

Type of Smoke.

There are three types of cigarette smoke.

Mainstream smoke,  Smoke that a smoker inhales through a cigarette filter
Exhalation smoke,  Smoke that a smoker inhales into his lungs and exhales (composition is almost the same as mainstream smoke)
Second-hand smoke, Smoke rising from the tip of a lit cigarette

Of these three types of smoke, second-hand smoke does not pass through a filter unlike mainstream smoke or exhaled smoke, making it more irritating and highly toxic. Just looking at the three major harmful substances, second-hand smoke contains 2.8 times more nicotine, 3.4 times more tar, and 4.7 times more carbon monoxide than mainstream smoke.

Risks from Smoking.

Cigarettes contain harmful substances such as tar, which can cause all kinds of cancer. In addition to cancer, it can also cause arteriosclerosis, myocardial infarction, stroke, periodontal disease, osteoporosis, facial wrinkles, and accelerated aging.

Furthermore, in recent years, a disease called ``COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)'' has been attracting attention worldwide as a ``tobacco disease''. COPD is a disease whose main symptoms are cough, phlegm, and shortness of breath, and the flow of air to the lungs is impaired (making it difficult to breathe) due to chronic bronchitis, chronic emphysema, or both. It is a very painful disease in which the air that has been inhaled cannot be exhaled properly, making it difficult to breathe in fresh air. Since he is unable to breathe freely, he has to wear an oxygen inhaler and has to wobble around to keep his breathing from becoming labored. Eventually, the patient begins to suffer from aspiration pneumonia [*] over and over again, and eventually loses weight and dies. COPD is said to be a disease that affects all smokers, and is truly the end of a smoker's past. If you don't want to live like this in your old age, you need to quit smoking right away.

Challenge to quit smoking.

There are many different ways to quit smoking. There are many ways to distract yourself by taking other actions, giving yourself a present on the day you quit smoking, and using nicotine patches and other smoking cessation aids. All of these methods are effective, and many people have actually been able to quit smoking using these methods.

However, at the root of these methods is the perseverance that ``I must quit smoking no matter what.'' If you try to quit smoking by suppressing your feelings such as ``I really want to smoke,'' you may eventually become exhausted and start smoking again. Rather than suppressing these feelings every time the desire to smoke increases, there is also something called ``aversion therapy'' that helps people feel like they don't want to smoke in the first place.

For example, setting an image of lungs that have turned black due to smoking as the wallpaper on your smartphone or PC is one example. It's not a very tasteful method, but every time I see it, I lose my desire to smoke. For a more extreme method, put cigarette ash, water (a small amount), and meat in a transparent container, close the lid tightly, and shake. This is a method of visually imprinting that what is happening inside the container is also happening inside the body. The key is to keep unopened cigarettes near the container. By looking at the two alternately, the imprinting in your brain will be further strengthened. However, if you use these methods on the go or at work, you will need to be creative and considerate.

A treatment method that involves conditioning the behavior and aversive stimuli in order to stop the unwanted behavior. Aversion therapy comes in many forms, and the name is not limited to the methods introduced above.


Finally.

A 50-year follow-up study conducted in the UK found that smokers live 10 years less than non-smokers. A Japanese study also reported that the average lifespan of smokers is reduced by 8 years for men and 10 years for women.

If you smoke 20 cigarettes every day for 50 years, the total number of cigarettes you smoke will be 365,000, and if you calculate the number of years lost as 10 years, each cigarette will shorten your life by 14.4 minutes. That's what happens. Some heavy smokers may think that they are willing to lose about 14.4 minutes if they can smoke just one cigarette. However, the effects of smoking are not that simple; there is a period of struggle before death, and it also increases the risk of morbidity and death for those around you. Smokers may need to once again realize what they lose by smoking.