Freedom From Smoking by Patricia Krenik - HTML preview

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Page 7 of 80

Freedom from Smoking Starts Now

2. Health Risks

Cigarettes possess over 4,000 chemical compounds, approximately 10% of which are toxic substances (including some that are known carcinogens). A cigarette burns at a temperature of 700° Celsius. This is a temperature high enough to cause the breakdown of tobacco to produce toxic constituents, which liberate into the atmosphere thereafter. Inhalation of these toxic substances over a certain period has various devastating effects on health.

Among the most injurious constituents of cigarette are tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide, which mainly affect your lungs and blood circulatory system. The effect of smoking is dependent on a number of factors, for instance:

The number of cigarettes you smoke.

How you smoke? Ironically, the 'side-stream smoke,' which is liberated between puffs, has a higher risk than smoke that you inhale directly. So avoid taking puffs.

The construction of a cigarette (whether or not it has a filter)

The method of preparation of tobacco it contains.

Smoking causes various short-term and long-term health hazards. Smokers have 25% greater sick days than the non-smokers do. Studies have revealed that the life span of smokers is seven or eight years shorter than that of the non-smokers.

According to one research study, there were as many as 1,690,000 premature deaths worldwide among the smokers due to cardiovascular problems alone.

All these deaths were in a single year. One of the studies came up with an 7.