Smoking Affects Your Looks and Life

There are 4,000 chemical components found in cigarettes and at least 250 of them are harmful to human health, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Here are a few examples:

• 1,3-Butadine is a chemical used to manufacture rubber.  According to the CDC, “it may increase risk of cancer in the stomach, blood and lymphatic system.”

• Acrolein is a gas linked to lung cancer. It inhibits DNA repair and can destroy the lining in the lungs that protects you from lung disease.

• Arsenic is used to preserve wood.  In humans, it can cause heart disease and cancer.

• Benzene is used to manufacture other chemicals. It can cause cancer, particularly leukemia, in humans.

• Cadmium is a metal used to make batteries.  Cadmium can interfere with the repair of damaged DNA, as well as damage the kidneys and the lining of the arteries.

• Chromium VI is used to make alloy metals, paint and dyes.  It has been proven to be linked to lung cancer.

• Formaldehyde is a chemical used to kill bacteria and preserve human and animal remains.  It’s a known cause of cancer, one of the main substances linked to chronic lung disease and a very toxic ingredient in secondhand smoke.

• Polonium-210 is a radioactive element inhaled directly into the airway.  Some studies show that people who smoke a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day are receiving the same radiation they’d get from 300-plus X-rays per year!

• Tar is solid, inhaled chemicals linked with an increased risk for cancer.  It also leaves a sticky, brown residue on your lungs, teeth and fingernails.

Smoking Surprisingly Affects Your Looks

Does smoking affect my sexual performance

Immediate effects

Low to moderate doses

Some of the effects that may be experienced after smoking tobacco include:

• initial stimulation, then reduction in activity of brain and nervous system

• increased alertness and concentration

• feelings of mild euphoria

• feelings of relaxation

• increased blood pressure and heart rate

• decreased blood flow to fingers and toes

• decreased skin temperature

• bad breath

• decreased appetite

• dizziness

• nausea, abdominal cramps and vomiting

• headache

• coughing, due to smoke irritation.

Does Cigarette Affects Sextual Life

Some Doctors Views About Smoking

“Smoking has a direct, negative effect on the sexuality of a man on every level,” says Panayiotis M. Zavos, PhD, director of the Andrology Institute of America and professor of reproductive physiology and andrology at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

From their work with couples being treated for infertility, Zavos and his fellow researchers have found that men’s smoking had a significant and negative effect on the ability to conceive. But they also turned up a surprise: Smoking significantly diminished a man’s sexual desire and satisfaction — even for young men in their 20s and 30s.

1-Mehmet Oz, MD, Cardiology

Smoking can have a big, bad effect on your sexual performance. If you’re a guy who smokes, your risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) is about twice that of guys who don’t smoke. And the more you smoke, the greater the risk. Not only does smoking cause ED, it can also cause infertility. Men who smoke have low sperm counts.

If you are a woman, you aren’t off the hook. Smoking can change the hormone levels in your body, leading to problems with your menstrual cycle, difficulty getting pregnant and an increased risk of miscarriage.

2-Micheal Roizen, MD, Internal Medicine,

How Cigarettes Damage Your Body

Cigarette smokers have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease.  Here’s why.

Factors like high blood pressure can stretch out the arteries and cause scarring. Bad cholesterol, called LDL, often gets lodged in the scar tissue and combines with white blood cells to form clots. The good cholesterol, called HDL, helps keep the LDL from sticking and building up.

Here are some other problems smoking causes:

• Smoking robs you of some of your good cholesterol.

• Smoking temporarily raises your blood pressure.

• Smoking increases the blood’s clotting likelihood.

• Smoking makes it more difficult to exercise.

• Smoking is estimated to increase the risk

• • • For coronary heart disease by 2 to 4 times

    • For stroke by 2 to 4 times

    • Of men developing lung cancer by 25 times

    • Of women developing lung cancer by 25.7 times

•  Smoking causes diminished overall heath, such as self-reported poor health, increased absenteeism from work, and increased health care utilization and cost.

Smoking and Cardiovascular Disease

Smokers are at greater risk for diseases that affect the heart and blood vessels (cardiovascular disease).

• Smoking causes stroke and coronary heart disease—the leading causes of death in the United States.

• Even people who smoke fewer than five cigarettes a day can have early signs of cardiovascular disease.

• Smoking damages blood vessels and can make them thicken and grow narrower. This makes your heart beat faster and your blood pressure go up. Clots can also form.

• A heart attack occurs when a clot blocks the blood flow to your heart. When this happens, your heart cannot get enough oxygen. This damages the heart muscle, and part of the heart muscle can die.

• A stroke occurs when a clot blocks the blood flow to part of your brain or when a blood vessel in or around your brain bursts.^1,2

• Blockages caused by smoking can also reduce blood flow to your legs and skin.

Smoking and Respiratory Disease

Smoking can cause lung disease by damaging your airways and the small air sacs (alveoli) found in your lungs.

• Lung diseases caused by smoking include COPD, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

• Cigarette smoking causes most cases of lung cancer.

• If you have asthma, tobacco smoke can trigger an attack or make an attack worse.

• Smokers are 12 to 13 times more likely to die from COPD than nonsmokers.

Smoking and Cancer

Smoking can cause cancer almost anywhere in your body:

• Bladder

• Blood (acute myeloid leukemia)

• Cervix

• Colon and rectum (colorectal)

• Esophagus

• Kidney and ureter

• Larynx

• Liver

• Oropharynx (includes parts of the throat, tongue, soft palate, and the tonsils)

• Pancreas

• Stomach

• Trachea, bronchus, and lung

If nobody smoked, one of every three cancer deaths in the United States would not happen. Smoking increases the risk of dying from cancer and other diseases in cancer patients and survivors.

Smoking and Other Health Risks

Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body and affects a person’s overall health.

• Smoking can make it harder for a woman to become pregnant and can affect her baby’s health before and after birth.

• Smoking increases risks for:

• Preterm (early) delivery

• Stillbirth (death of the baby before birth)

• Low birth weight

• Sudden infant death syndrome (known as SIDS or crib deatht

• Ectopic pregnancy

• Orofacial clefts in infants

• Smoking can also affect men’s sperm, which can reduce fertility and also increase risks for birth defects and miscarriage (loss of the pregnancy).

• Smoking can affect bone health.Smoking affects the health of your teeth and gums and can cause tooth loss.

• Women past childbearing years who smoke have lower bone density (weaker bones) than women who never smoked and are at greater risk for broken bones.

• Smoking can increase your risk for cataracts (clouding of the eye’s lens that makes it hard for you to see) and age-related macular degeneration (damage to a small spot near the center of the retina, the part of the eye needed for central vision).

• Smoking is a cause of type 2 diabetes mellitus and can make it harder to control. The risk of developing diabetes is 30–40% higher for active smokers than nonsmokers.

• Smoking causes general adverse effects on the body. It can cause inflammation and adverse effects on immune function.

• Smoking is a cause of rheumatoid arthritis.

Effects of smoking on the immune system

The effects of tobacco smoke on the immune system include:

• Greater susceptibility to infections such as pneumonia and influenza

• More severe and longer-lasting illnesses

• Lower levels of protective antioxidants (such as vitamin C), in the blood.

Effects of smoking on the sexual organs

The effects of tobacco smoke on the male body include:

• Lower sperm count

• Higher percentage of deformed sperm

• Genetic damage to sperm

• Impotence, which may be due to the effects of smoking on blood flow and damage to the blood vessels of the penis.

The smokers reported having sex less than six times a month, whereas the nonsmoking men were having sex nearly twice as often. This difference is especially significant considering that these couples were actively trying to conceive. “In current research, we are trying to identify how and why tobacco use negatively impacts men’s sexual performance. In my clinical experience, it does decrease performance. Sexual performance is more than just erectile function; it involves many of the systems of the body,” says Zavos. “But when a man’s ability to have sex decreases, his appetite for sex will generally follow.”

Best Quiting Smoking Tips

No. 1: Know Why You Want to Quit

So you want to quit smoking, but do you know why? “Because it’s bad for you” isn’t good enough. To get motivated, you need a powerful, personal reason to quit. Maybe you want to protect your family from secondhand smoke. Maybe the thought of lung cancer frightens you. Or maybe you’’d like to look and feel younger. Choose a reason that is strong enough to outweigh the urge to light up.

No. 2: Don’t Go Cold Turkey

It may be tempting to toss your cigarettes and declare you’ve quit, plain and simple. But going cold turkey isn’t easy to do. About 95% of people who try to stop smoking without therapy or medication end up relapsing. The reason is that nicotine is addictive. The brain becomes used to having nicotine and craves it. In its absence, the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal occur.

No. 3: Try Nicotine-Replacement Therapy

When you stop smoking, nicotine withdrawal may make you feel frustrated, depressed, restless, or irritable. The craving for “just one drag” may be overwhelming. Nicotine-replacement therapy can help reduce these feelings. Studies suggest nicotine gum, lozenges, and patches can help double your chances of quitting successfully when used with an intensive behavioral program. But using these products while smoking is generally not recommended

No. 4: Ask About Prescription Pills

To ease nicotine withdrawal without using products that contain nicotine, ask your doctor about prescription medications. There are pills that help reduce cravings by affecting chemicals in the brain. They may also make smoking less satisfying if you do pick up a cigarette. Other drugs can help reduce troubling withdrawal symptoms, such as depression or inability to concentrate

No. 5: Don’t Go It Alone

Tell your friends, family, and co-workers that you’re trying to quit. Their encouragement could make the difference. You may also want to join a support group or talk to a counselor. Behavioral therapy is a type of counseling that helps you identify and stick to quit-smoking strategies. Combine behavioral therapy with nicotine replacement products and/or medication to boost your odds of success.

Try nicotine replacement therapy

Talk with your doctor about nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) to help deal with cravings. The nicotine nasal spray and the nicotine inhaler are available by prescription, as are the stop-smoking medications bupropion (Zyban) and varenicline (Chantix). However, some types of NRT, including patches, gum and lozenges, are available over-the-counter (OTC).

After reviewing decades of research, the Food and Drug Administration recently announced that there’s no significant safety concerns associated with using more than one OTC NRT at the same time. So if you’re using nicotine replacement patches, gum or lozenges while trying to quit but you slip up and have a cigarette, you don’t need to stop using the NRT. Instead, keep using the NRT and keep trying to quit.

Avoid triggers

Urges for tobacco are likely to be strongest in the situations where you smoked or chewed tobacco most often, such as at parties or bars, in the car, or while watching television. Identify your trigger situations and have a plan in place to avoid them entirely or get through them without using tobacco. Don’t set yourself up for a smoking relapse. If you usually smoked while you talked on the phone, for instance, keep a pen and paper nearby to occupy yourself with doodling rather than smoking.

Delay

If you feel like you’re going to give in to your tobacco craving, tell yourself that you must first wait 10 more minutes and then do something to distract yourself for that period of time. This simple trick may be enough to derail your tobacco craving. Repeat as often as needed.

Chew on it

Give your mouth something to do to fight a tobacco craving. Chew on sugarless gum or hard candy, or munch on raw carrots, celery, nuts or sunflower seeds — something crunchy and satisfying.

Don’t have ‘just one’

 You might be tempted to have just one cigarette to satisfy a tobacco craving. But don’t fool yourself into believing that you can stop at just one. More often than not, having just one leads to another— and you may end up using tobacco again.