Cigarette Smoking and Its Effect on Women’s Health
Since the 60’s, the number of women who continue to smoke cigarettes have decreased very little compared to the number of men who decided that smoking is far too dangerous a habit to keep and is a wise decision to learn how to stop smoking. In fact, in a survey of college and high school students, girls are more likely to start smoking than are boys. The bad news is, women usually suffer unique health and other risks from smoking than men, but there is hope. They also enjoy unique benefits when they decide to find out how to stop smoking.
For example, women who smoke are less fertile than non-smoking women. This means smokers take a lot more time to get pregnant than non-smokers so it’s obviously advisable to learn how to stop smoking if you want to be a mother. The U.S. Surgeon General reported in 1990 that if all women who smoke stop, the number of infantile deaths in the country would decrease by 5%. Women who stop before they get pregnant or in their first trimester of pregnancy greatly reduces their risk of giving birth to a low-birth weight baby. If they continue to smoke until they give birth, the risks become the same as that of a woman who never smoked.
Even pregnant women with spouses who still continue to smoke cigarettes are at a great risk of giving unhealthy birth to her baby. The risks of a baby being born with less than normal weight and health problems are higher to mothers who are exposed to secondhand smoke. Ultimately, the end scenario is usually bad for women with unborn babies, often resulting in miscarriages or low birth weight. A baby born to a smoker is often small and has health problems and need special care and stays in the hospital longer than normal babies. This in itself should be enough reason to want to learn how to stop smoking.
Smoking also increases the risk of developing osteoporosis in women which makes them stoop as they age. Smoking women also show more signs of premature aging and wrinkles than women who never smoked. Isn’t it ironic that all of these are actually caused by smoking while cigarette ads often show good looking women in very romanticized scenes? They never really show all the chest pain, the wrinkles and the subsequent stress that smoking causes, do they?
Benefits of Quitting Smoking
It is very easy to think that since you’ve already smoked for several years now, the damage has been done, so what’s the point of finding out how to stop smoking for your health? This could not be any more farther than the truth. The health benefits from stopping cigarettes are as endless as the health risks that it causes. The human body is an amazing machine, with incredible resilience. The moment you take that first step at being a full pledged non-smoker, your body begins to heal itself from all the harm your habit has done to you.
At twenty minutes after throwing away that last stick, your body undergoes a lot of changes. Your pulse rate increases which means your heart begins to pump more blood to your body, increasing your blood pressure if it’s too low, or normalizing it if it’s too high. Your overall body temperature also begins to return to normal as more blood is pumped to your fingers and toes.
Eight hours later after your learn how to stop smoking, the amount of carbon monoxide in your body drops down dramatically and the oxygen in your blood increases. As soon as a day after stopping, your chances of contracting heart diseases start to decrease. When you were an avid smoker, did you have trouble distinguishing different tastes and smells from each other? Well 48 hours after you stop, your damaged nerve endings begins to regenerate which means your senses will begin to improve including the sensitivity of your fingers and your senses of taste and smell.
Beginning at the two week mark up to three months after choosing to learn how to stop smoking, your circulation will improve drastically which means more endurance and more strength to do some of the things you used to run out of breath of like walking, jogging and running. Your lung function also improves greatly at this time. In 9 months, coughing will begin to occur less often. You’ll probably notice your sinuses are clearer and your throat is no longer constantly irritated.
Actually, there are a lot more other benefits that you can enjoy in choosing how to stop smoking. Your singing voice will also improve. Your peripheral and night vision will be better. If you are having troubles with impotence, in six weeks, the chances of you sporting an erection again will increase by 35%. In addition to a revitalized sex life, you will also look better with less wrinkles and decreased chances of premature aging and baldness.
You will also just feel plain better. You’ll find yourself being able to do more things that you enjoy doing in life, with more energy to do it and more money to help you achieve it.
The Real Costs of Cigarette Smoking
Attitudes towards cigarette smoking are changing all over America. More and more people are actually realizing how much there is to lose with a habit that gives little or no benefits at all. If all the health risks aren’t enough to change your mind from smoking, then maybe knowing how much cigarettes are truly costing you, in dollars, will, and how learning how to stop smoking can actually put money in your pocket!
If the government charged you an extra $398 as “smoker tax,” how would you feel? Would you feel cheated? Or would you feel like the government deserves it? The truth is, cigarette smoking costs Americans a yearly sum of $100 billion (that’s one thousand millions) for smoking related health expenses and productivity loss. In the early 90’s the additional costs to smoking a pack of cigarettes is actually two dollars. This means that for every pack you smoke, you’re actually subsidizing an additional two dollars for future health problems it’s going to cause you. That’s in 1991. Today, this amount have increased to $3.90 per pack, almost doubled in less than twenty years. What’s worse, that doesn’t even include estimates for burns, or damage and loss of property from smoking related fires and accidents, or infant and children’s health concerns from secondhand smoke and prenatal smoking. Caring for your siblings or children alone should be enough reason for you to want to find out how to stop smoking.
In one lifetime, a smoker exceeds a non-smoker by up to a total of $501 billion in health related expenses alone. At $2 a pack, an average one pack-a-day smoker spends up to $700 to $800 dollars for his or her habit. If somebody offered you $800 to learn how to stop smoking for a year, would you? Imagine all the other things you could buy with $800, maybe even enough lottery tickets to get you to actually win millions more.
If that’s not enough to discourage you to smoke, how would knowing that a majority of the population, most of the people you meet on a day-to-day basis, don’t approve of your habit. If you smoke because it gives you a “cool” image, think again. Maybe back in 1964, it would have worked, but today, it barely would. Back then 50% of the adult population smoked cigarettes, now only a quarter of that population is still hooked. And that’s not all, cigarette smoking is now banned in most restaurants, planes, parks and other public places. It is almost becoming a necessity to learn how to stop smoking.
Non-smokers don’t agree with smoking. The truth is, nine out of ten of people who actually does smoke, don’t agree with their smoking, too! One of the largest government funded survey found out that the majority of the population thinks smoking is now such a huge problem that something should be done about it. What excuse do you have?
The Truths and Myths About Cigars
It’s surprising how much tobacco companies try and promote the cigar as a safer and more pleasurable alternative to smoking cigarettes. They’ve created such a buzz about it that a fad of “cigar bars” and magazines devoted to cigar smoking and cigar paraphernalia have sprung up all over the country. There are ads showing celebrities, male and female, who smoke cigars trying to create a glamorous image to an unhealthy and deadly activity. Deadly activity that can be avoided if you choose to learn how to stop smoking.
Many cigar smokers smoke just 1 or 2 cigars per day and immediately assume that because that’s considerably lower than the amount of cigarettes they would otherwise smoke in a day, it is safer. This is a myth. What they don’t know is that one pack of cigarettes contains the same amount of tobacco as one cigar. If you smoke 2 cigars a day, you’re as bad as a smoker who downs two packs in 24 hours. A smoker spends an hour finishing a cigar, and this is usually done while he or she is in the presence of other cigar smokers. Imagine a small room full of people huffing and puffing toxic smoke at each other, just walking through that room and breathing in that air is already a health hazard, without having to actually sit down and smoke a cigar yourself. Choosing to find out how to stop smoking can eliminate these health hazards and actually allow your body to being a healing process.
Another myth about cigar is that it’s not harmful because it doesn’t say so in its packaging. The thing with cigars is that they’re not required to show the Surgeon General’s warning like cigarettes. Cigar makers and exporters are also not required to submit to the government a complete list of ingredients used to make that cigar. Now if that isn’t suspicious enough to discourage you, what is? The truth is cigar smoking is not safe. Cigar smokers are actually four to ten times more likely to die from laryngeal, oral and esophageal cancers than average smokers. This increases if coupled with alcoholism.
There are a lot of other myths surrounding cigars, pipes and other “safe” tobacco products. One of the biggest myths is that cigars aren’t addictive. The truth is nicotine is present in either cigar or cigarette and as long as there is nicotine there is always a chance to be hooked to it. People also think that since you don’t really inhale when smoking cigars, it’s a lot safer. Wrong. You still inhale smoke, from the time you hold a lit cigar in your mouth to the smoke that lingers around you to breathe in, you still inhale that, which means you are at the same risk for lung cancer, emphysema or chronic bronchitis with cigars as much as you are with cigarettes. The only way to rid yourself of these toxic hazards is to learn how to stop smoking!
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Cigarette Smoking
For some reason, every smoker seem to have an Uncle Bob or Aunt Mary who smoked like crazy and still lived to a ripe old age. This is one reason why so many people discount all the harmful effects of smoking, because it’s easier to focus on the exceptions to the cases (which are remarkably few) than to worry about the magnitude of the examples which show otherwise. Think back to how your Uncle Bob or Aunt Mary was while they smoked, they may have lived long enough, but that did not mean they didn’t suffer. One of the worst diseases that’s primarily caused by smoking cigarettes is COPD or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. If you’ve smoked for stope some time now, chances are you have it, however it is not too late to learn how to stop smoking and save yourself.
So what exactly is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease? It’s a disease which 16 million Americans suffer from. It ranks as the fourth primary cause of death in America, after heart attacks, cancer and stroke. COPD is not pretty. One of its common forms, emphysema, develops over many years of smoking related lung tissue damage. It weakens your lungs ability to take air in and breathe air out by affecting its tissues’ elasticity, so they can’t expand and contract the way normal lungs would. With emphysema, the effort to breathe increases dramatically until it reaches a point where every breathe you take is actually a chore.
To get to know what this feels like, imagine hiking to the highest point of a mountain where the air is so thin and it’s actually hard to breathe. You lungs have to double their efforts to extract oxygen from the air and this extra effort double the weight of any activity or task you are doing. Suddenly, taking the next few steps up the mountain, or even picking up some heavy equipment gets followed by extreme shortness of breath and huffing and puffing. Now imagine having to feel like that every minute of every day, that’s what having emphysema is like. The bad thing is, if you don’t choose to learn how to stop smoking, things will only get worse!
The good news is, once you’ve stop, your body begins healing itself as soon as twenty minutes after putting out your last cigarette. You blood pressure, pulse rate and body temperature all return to normal just after twenty minutes of stopping. After one day, the balance of carbon monoxide and oxygen levels inside your body returns to normal and your risks of dying from a heart attack begins decreasing immediately. After just 1 year, your risks of having coronary heart diseases matches that of a person who never smoked at all.
