As a young person in this day and age, you get a lot of conflicting messages and influences on many issues. The facts are usually skewed and you never hear it like it really is, regardless if you’re hearing it from friends, parents, or media. Well tobacco smoking is one of those issues and I’m going to try to clear it up a little by laying out the cold, hard, and unbiased facts.
First of all, I will tell you that smoking tobacco is not in any way healthy for you. It is actually quite unhealthy. Obviously, duh. It also costs a decent amount of money to get tobacco. So why do people do it so religiously you ask? Well because it makes them feel good and relieves some of their stress. Also, some do it for social purposes. So smoking a cigarette (or any kind of tobacco) is a give and take situation. Basically you trade a little bit of your health and money to temporarily feel a little better. Some may say this is evil, and some may say this is a nice option to have, but I say this is merely a choice for an individual to make. It’s your body and your life (and your money), so you have the right to decide. However, make sure you understand the consequences of your choices.
I’ll try to explain what exactly happens when you smoke tobacco. I’ll use a cigarette as an example. Every cigarette contains roughly 4000 types of chemicals, most of which are bad for you. The ones that prominently affect on you are nicotine, carbon monoxide and tar. What nicotine does to you is it triggers the release of adrenaline in your body. This causes you to be more alert at first, but eventually dulls your senses. It also makes your body work faster and harder, so that your heart needs more oxygen to perform effectively. Nicotine is the addicting part of cigarettes, so it is responsible for the withdrawal symptoms people go through when they try to quit. It also makes blood clot easier, increasing the chance of heart attack.
Anyway, while the adrenaline is being released, the carbon monoxide in cigarettes enters the bloodstream. It replaces up to 15% of the oxygen that would normally be carried by red blood cells, causing less oxygen to be carried to the heart that already needs more oxygen because of the adrenaline release. Carbon monoxide also damages the inner lining of blood vessels and increases fat deposits there too, making it easier for blood to clot up. Meanwhile, the tar that enters your body contains many cancer-causing substances than can, well obviously, cause cancer. Examples of the other, less significant, but still damaging to the body, chemicals in cigarettes that enter would be acetone, DDT, arsenic, cadmium, formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, naphthalene, Polonium-210,Vinyl chloride and etc. Many of these chemicals can also cause cancer and/or other shitty things such as heart disease or chronic bronchitis.
The more you smoke, the more these chemicals build up. Your body naturaly repairs itself and gets rid of these chemicals, but if you’re putting more of these into your body than it can get rid of, then there will clearly be problems. Now that I’ve scared you enough, I remind you that almost anything is all right in moderation. The occasional cigarette here and there will relatively do nothing to you in the long run, but it will still do something. Heavy smoking will inevitably do bad things to your body, but what happens depends on the amount you smoke. So the choice is up to you. If you want more information, check out www.tobacco.org. It has the latest news and info on tobacco, plus links to other tobacco related sites.
by: DJ Booker
