How Smoking Affects our Body

Of all the teenage behaviors that have a lasting effect on our health, smoking is probably the most damaging. Most of us start smoking as a form of peer pressure or right of passage. It looks like fun and an adult thing to do not knowing that we are slowly damaging our bodies with sometimes irreversible consequences.

The numbers of chemicals that are contained in a cigarette butt leave hardly any part of our body unaffected. A simple tour of our body can show exactly how chemicals in cigarettes can affect your whole body.

Your Skin

Your skin is the largest organ in the body and cigarette smoking can have devastating and often irreversible damage to your skin. Our skin absorbs nearly all the chemicals contained in cigarette smoke. Some of these chemicals are actually poisonous gases such as ammonia, pyridine, parvoline, butane and even arsenic

Smoking also deprives your skin of vital vitamin C. Lack of vitamin C will deprive your skin of the ability to generate new healthy cells that give that youthful look.

Smoking will lead to breaking of collagen resulting in wrinkles and sunken eyes and dark circles around the eyes of a smoker. You will also have the smoker’s dark lips after they have been deprived of necessary oxygen to keep them healthy.

Your Mouth

Every cigarette you smoke increases your chance of getting cancer of the mouth. It is not a surprise that most chain smokers have gum disease, tooth decay and bad breath. You will be hard pressed to find smokers that are not yellowing and even unsightly.

Lack of oxygen and narrowed blood vessels to the brain can even lead to strokes at premature ages. No amount of mouth wash can stop the harmful effects of the poisons in a cigarette.

Lungs, Heart and Bronchi

The effects of smoking are slowly and deadly. We all have seen those emphysema commercials and they do not look pretty.

As cigarette smoke passes down your bronchi, cigarette chemicals such as Hydrogen cyanide attack the lining of the bronchi, inflaming them and causing the chronic smoker’s cough. You are 10 times more likely to get bronchial infections than a non-smoker.

Nicotine in your heart raises blood pressure and can cause blood clots. Carbon monoxide robs your heart of oxygen leading to an increased risk of a heart attack. The effects of smoking to your heart can literally be heart stopping. You can loss circulation to your fingers and toes and even impotence.

Smoking is a devastating habit and there is no measure of the health risks that it posses to those who smoke or not. Women smokers are at an increased risk of cervical cancer, and those that are pregnant put their unborn babies at risk.

All is not lost however; it is possible to reverse the harmful effects of smoking. The moment you quit smoking, your body begins to repair itself and ten years after quitting, your body will have repaired most of the damage. You do not have to wait for the effects of lung cancer or emphysema as it might be too late to reverse.

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