The Many Health Risks of Smoking
Why should you quit smoking? There are a handful of serious reasons to stop smoking, and maybe the most important is that your habit could kill someone else. Each year roughly fifty thousand people around the world will die from their exposure to secondhand smoke.
It is also significant to note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States discovered that male smokers will lose 13.2 years of life and females 14.5 years simply because of their smoking habit. If that doesn’t make someone want to quit, then the fact that around five million people around the world die each year because of their tobacco use might motivate them to finally discard the habit.
We might also take a look at the various diseases from which these people perish in order to demonstrate the importance of choosing to quit smoking as well. The most well-known side effect of using tobacco products is the development of cancer that it often causes. There is not just a single form of this deadly disease connected to tobacco, and people can die from lung, mouth, larynx, throat, esophageal, kidney, pancreas, stomach and bladder cancers that result from their choice to continue smoking.
Additionally, the toxicity of tobacco smoke destroys the lungs, and millions of people will develop emphysema or COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) which is actually a group of diseases that worsen over time and cause chronic illness.
Smoking also increases the heart rate and blood pressure and makes a smoker twice as likely to die from a heart attack as a non-smoker. In addition to this, smoking also causes blood vessel diseases such as peripheral vascular disease that narrows the vessels which carry blood to the limbs and the brain and can lead to everything from strokes to impotence in men.
It is interesting to note that many people worry about the effects of their choice to quit smoking, such as the common weight gain that comes with the cessation of their habit. Medical experts universally agree, however, that a five to fifteen pound weight gain will present few if any risks to the overall health of the former smoker, and that such worries are unrealistic in the face of the obvious threats presented by smoking. In fact, someone who stops smoking is going to see dramatic improvement in their health right away. Within one year after quitting the risk of heart disease is cut in half of that of a smoker, and within five years the chance of stroke is that of a non-smoker. This clearly points out that quitting is the healthiest option available.
