What Are The Effects Of Smoking And Tobacco?

What happens in your body
When you smoke, harmful chemicals enter your lungs and spread through your body. They can:

reach your brain, heart and other organs within 10 seconds of your first puff
go everywhere your blood flows, harming every part of your body.

Cigarette Smoke contains the following

How you become addicted
The nicotine in tobacco is highly addictive. It makes your brain release a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a ‘feel good’ chemical that:

●makes you feel happy
helps you to concentrate
gives you more energy.
But this effect doesn’t last long.

●As the nicotine levels in your body fade, your brain craves more dopamine. The longer you have been smoking, the more dopamine you need to feel good. You become dependent on nicotine.

●Once you are dependent on nicotine, without it, you will have withdrawal symptoms. You may find it difficult to concentrate or feel nervous, restless, irritable, or anxious.

These two things — nicotine dependence and nicotine withdrawal — make you want to smoke more. You become addicted to tobacco.

How tobacco damages your body
The chemicals in tobacco smoke can damage your body in many ways. For example:

Nicotine narrows your veins and arteries. This can
damage your heart by forcing it to work faster and harder
slow your blood and reduce oxygen to your feet and hands.
Carbon monoxide deprives your heart of the oxygen it needs to pump blood around your body. Over time, your airways swell up and let less air into your lungs.
Tar is a sticky substance that coats your lungs like soot in a chimney.
Phenols paralyse and kill the hair-like cells in your airways. These cells sweep clean the lining of your airways and protect them against infections.
Tiny particles in tobacco smoke irritate your throat and lungs and cause ‘smoker’s cough’. This makes you produce more mucus and damages lung tissue.
Ammonia and formaldehyde irritate your eyes, nose, and throat.
Cancer-causing chemicals make your cells grow too fast or abnormally. This can result in cancer cells.

How tobacco affects the way you look
Smoking tobacco can:

●cause yellow-brown stains on your fingers, tongue, and teeth
increase your risk of tooth loss and bad breath
●make your skin saggy and give you early wrinkles
●make your hair lose its natural shine.

Health effects

If you smoke, you:

●reduce your life expectancy and your quality of life
increase your risk of many conditions and diseases as well as of dying prematurely.
●It can be a long time before smokers get a smoking-related condition or disease. Because of this, some people believe it won’t happen to them.

In fact, up to ⅔ of long-term smokers will:

●die of a smoking-related disease
have their life cut short by about 10 years on average, compared to non-smokers.
●There is also growing evidence to suggest that smoking has a negative impact on mental health. For example, some studies show that smoking is associated with increased rates of anxiety, panic attacks, depression, suicide attemp, s and schizophrenia.

Some of the conditions and diseases that can be caused by smoking

●developing diabetes 30 to 40% higher for active smokers than non-smokers. Smoking may also worsen some of the health conditions related to type 1 diabetes, such as kidney disease.
Infections
●Smoking weakens your immune system so you’re more likely to get bacterial and viral infections.
Dental problems
●Smoking increase the risk of gum diseases, tooth loss and tooth sensitivity. Once a person has gum damage, smoking also makes it harder for their gums to heal.
●Hearing loss
Smoking reduces blood flow to the inner ear. Smokers may also lose their hearing earlier than a non-smoker.
●Vision loss
Smoking damages the eye and can lead to macular degeneration — the main cause of blindness in the world.
●Fertility problems
Smoking can make it more difficult to fall pregnant and affect sperm quality. Find out more about smoking and tobacco and pregnancy.
●Osteoporosis and menopause
Smoking is a risk factor for osteoporosis and in women, which may result in early menopause compared to a non-smoker.

Effects on those around you
As a smoker, you can affect the health of other people when they breathe in your second-hand smoke. This means they’re breathing in the same toxic and cancer-causing chemicals that you are.

Financial effects
Smoking is expensive. To work out how much you could save if you stopped smoking, try the I Can Quit calculator . The numbers add up over a year.