Smoking & Cancer

Keywords

Smoking, cancer, lungs, tar, low oxygen intake, lung cancer, increased risk, exascerbation, homeostasis, chemicals, disease, emphysema, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease).

Introduction

So, you want to smoke cigarettes (or worse), and you're not bothered about the repercussions of it. Right?

People smoke. It's a thing. Not as many people smoke in today's world as they used to (it's peak in the UK was in the 1960s), but even today there are many people who do smoke.

What Does Smoking do to Your Lungs?

From this video, you can see that a pair of lungs that are from a smoker are a dark grey or black, and have been filled with tar. This tar can affect other parts of the body, because where there is tar, there is not. enough oxygen able to be stored in the alveoli of your lungs.

This in turn can exascerbate you in other ways, because your breathing will become shallow, and then you will not be able to have your heart pump as much blood around your body, which will in turn make you cold, and it will have negative effects on your homeostasis.

Basically, if you smoke it can be bad for you. Even one cigarette could possibly give you a disease of some sort. It's just not good for you.

Links to Cancer

A major disease, cancer, can develop in the lungs due to the harsh chemicals in a cigarette - chemicals like cadmium (common in batteries), arsenic (a common poision), carbon monoxide, butane (lighter fluid), and nicotine (used in pesticides).

So, all those chemicals going into your body from one cigarette. Then it is no wonder that your body gives up the ghost and decides to have uncontrollable growths in the lungs.

Interesting fact: where there are households with both parents that smoke, children living in the same house have a higher risk of around 72% of respiratory illnesses, as well as a higher chance that they too will smoke when old enough.

I Smoke, What Can I do?

I don't actually smoke, that's just the headline. As we all know, smoking is an addiction, and therefore is difficult for some people to fully quit. If you are one of these people who don't think you can quit, there are options.

You can reduce the amount you smoke. If you smoke 40 a day, try going down to 30 or even lower. It can be done in small steps (say, 5 a day reduction for a week, then 10, and so on), or you can change the cigarettes for something else. You could start to vape, which most brands remove the harmful gases from the liquid you vape, but still has the nicotine in them, which is what your body craves.

Patches and gum: you can use a patch that will release the nicotine into your body (as this is what the body will crave if you give up fully), and will help you to quit. The gum works in the same fashion.

Lung Cancer & Other Diseases

If you smoke regularly, and by a large amount, you could end up with lung cancer. Cancer is an uncontrollable growth of cells in your body, and smoking can cause this to eviscerate further. This is because of the smoke you inhale, as described above.

This is the main danger of smoking, but it can also present other diseases or conditions such as COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) or Emphysema, which is a component of the former. They both work against your breathing, as they restrict the amount you can breathe in and out with your lungs. You could also suffer from pneumonia, which is water on the lungs as a result of the lungs functions not working efficiently.