Smoking and Aging

Smoking and Wrinkles

effects of smoking

Tobacco companies now admit that smoking is deadly. Smoking can be blamed for virtually half of all premature deaths every year-- more than four hundred thousand. Smoking continues to be the greatest public health hazard we face. We all acknowledge that smoking can cause lung cancer, but we can't foretell which smokers will get it and which will not. All the same, what is predictable from cigarettes is aging of the arteries, the most significant aging effect of cigarettes. Every smoker would get it. Aging of the arteries inescapably causes wrinkling of the skin, impotence, and decay in the quality of orgasm, and also heart disease, stroke, and memory loss. Whether they go to your reproductive organs, skin, or heart, bad arteries cause the same troubles all over the body.

The effects of smoking do not show up thirty years down the line but right now, this very day. You'll discover new wrinkles in your face. Smoking ages the skin prematurely by two mechanisms; first it ages your arteries; and second, it diminishes the ability of your lungs to furnish oxygen to your blood. By these two mechanisms, smoking decreases the quantity of oxygen that gets to your skin cells, making them age faster than they should. It also results in shortness of breath that leads to emphysema. The lack of oxygen further ages your lungs by decreasing the ability of your immune system and lung protective systems to work normally, leading to a high incidence of respiratory disorder, plus a loss of stamina and energy. Smoking clogs your arteries with inflammation that may lead to high blood pressure that further ages your arteries; it is an awful positive feedback loop to make you older by making you more vulnerable to infections and bringing up your blood pressure.

 If you're a smoker and have a pack-a-day habit, consider yourself eight years older. Think you're forty? Try forty-eight on for size. Even if you smoke just 4 cigarettes a day, which is barely any at all, you would be at least 2.6 years older. Even when you don't smoke but live with a smoker or work in a smoke-filled surroundings for just four hours a day, your could almost be seven years older.

 Prohibiting smoking inside bars and restaurants maybe the best thing that happened for the employees of these establishments. This probably saved restaurant and bar owners and workers more than 4 million years of aging and hundreds of millions in lawsuits. If you are a smoker, you must be tired of your family and friends nagging you to quit. You're probably disgusted of the self-righteous attitude nonsmokers can have and how hard-hitting they can get. And perhaps some of your annoyance is a defensive reaction, masking a deep down fear that you can not quit. No one blames you for having these feelings. Lecturing never solves anything.  Know these facts instead:

 The process by which smoking ages the body is multi-factored and bears on the whole body. It causes inflammation in every major systems and organs. Smoking also makes it more likely that bad (LDL) cholesterol will gather in the walls of the arteries. For reasons that are not yet clear, smoking brings down the level of good (HDL) cholesterol—the type that removes the LDL cholesterol—in your bloodstream.

One study also found that women who smoked a pack and a half a day had 5 to 7 times the risk of heart attack as women who had never smoked. Nevertheless, no level of smoking is safe.