How is Smoking Harmful for You and Those around You?
Although you have likely been inundated with the message that smoking is bad for you, you may actually have questions about how is smoking bad for you and for those around you. Smoking can have a very serious, negative and life threatening impact not only on your life but on the lives of your children, spouses, and friends. When it comes to your own health, you need to understand and appreciate up front that an astounding one out of two people who smoke will die from a disease that will be caused by smoking. In other words, if you take up smoking, you have a fifty-fifty chance of dying younger than you should from your habit. That means that there is a 50% chance that your children will lose a parent early and your spouse will be abandoned earlier than they should be. You also need to be well aware that of those fifty percent of all smokers who actually will die as a result of their habit, a full half of those individuals will not live beyond middle age. We are not saying that some smokers don’t, but if you smoke you are more than 50% more likely to die before the average age of demise. Stated another way, if you choose to smoke, there is a one in four chance that you will not live long beyond your forties. Smoking is a major cause of a variety of different types of cancers, a major cause of heart disease and a significant cause of strokes. One in five deaths that occur as a result of heart disease is the result of smoking. However, when one considers younger people who die from heart disease, a remarkable four out of five of these deaths are the result of smoking. Smoking can also adversely affect the health of people around you. In simple terms, second hand smoke is very dangerous. The American Medical Association has reported that upwards to 40,000 deaths in the United States alone each year is the result of second hand smoke. Researchers have determined that a non-smoker living with a smoker has a 25% increase in the risk of death from heart disease and from different types of cancers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 lung cancer deaths occur each year as the result of second hand smoke. While occasional exposure to second hand smoke generally is not deemed particularly harmful, researchers have concluded that living with a smoker is not the only type of exposure to “passive smoking” that can be harmful. These experts have determined that regular exposure to smoke in a work environment such as occurs with the staff of a tavern or restaurant that permits smoking can markedly increase the risk that such an individual will become afflicted with a smoking related disease or ailment. Finally, passive smoking or second hand smoke is proving to be particularly harmful to infants and children. Many experts agree that second hand smoke can cause a number of serious (many life threatening) illnesses and conditions in infants and children including:
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