How Smoking Affects Your Health
We all know breathing is essential and directly linked to our health, breathing fresher air provides less polluted oxygen.Breathing sustains life, every time you breathe in precious oxygen it makes everything work inside your body in the right way.
What happens when your smoke a cigarette and inhale smoke instead of air?
As you are inhaling all that smoke from a single puff, you‘re inhaling seven thousand chemicals, more than 200 known carcinogens, hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide ammonia amongst others. But it doesn’t just affect your lungs, every puff of a cigarette is causing your heart to pump faster, your blood pressure to go higher. It affects every single organ system in your body. Smoking can even get you bladder cancer.
Addictive nature of cigarettes
Many people think that smoking is just a bad habit, but it is more than just that as it causes all the above-mentioned diseases and health problems with the respiratory system, blood pressure, cardiovascular system. For many people it a very serious addiction.
Smoking affects look
Smoking doesn’t affect just the inside of our body; it also affects the outside too. Skin is the biggest organ on our body as it covers our whole body, and is just important as the heart. Skin is responsible for toxin release and other functions. Cigarettes age your skin faster than anything else.
Smoking deprives the skin of oxygen and nutrients by affecting your blood vessels. The chemicals that you are addicted to, that cigarettes contain, are triggering the destruction of what we need in our skin to keep it healthy, collagen and elastin, the fibers that give your skin that youthful healthy and fresh look. Smoking also makes you look older by creating the wrinkles around your mouth and nose. The color of the skin also changes.
The problem of weight gain
[box type=”bio”] Speaking of appearance, most people don’t want to stop smoking because they will gain more weight. That may be true as food gets tastier and smells better. Smoking increases the risks of getting cataract as you age, it makes it more difficult to see as it affects your eyesight. It can also weaken your bones causing osteoporosis.[/box]
Reverse natural healing process
Some studies even suggest that people who smoke are more likely to go bald, develop gum disease amongst other. The good thing about quitting smoke is that a lot of the damage cigarettes made to your body can be undone and reversed due to the natural healing processes that happen in the body all the time. When you quit, within minutes your body starts to heal itself. In the first 20 minutes, your blood pressure and heart rate drop down to a normal state. Within first 12 hours upon quitting cigarettes your carbon monoxide levels drops down to relatively healthy amounts. After two weeks your circulation, lung capacity and functions improve drastically. And finally after just one month, shortness of breath begin to decrease as the body is completely free of toxins from cigarettes by now. Think about these harmful effects of the cigarettes next time you are reaching for the pack of cigarettes.
