• Question: How does smoking affect you?? Does it make you breath hard?? Decrease your weight ??

    Asked by aiishii to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by emmagrace.
    • Photo: Dalya Soond

      Dalya Soond answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Smoking can sometimes decrease your weight, but def not a good diet method. Nicotine in cigarettes is a stimulant that acts on your brain to increase you metabolism (the rate at which you process nutrients from food).

      It can make you breathe hard especially if you are a long term or heavy smoker. All the toxins in the cigs (esp. the tar) coat your lung cells, which makes it hard to get oxygen into them. It can also damage the lungs and cause types of scars called ephysema and also COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). To make up for it, your body will increase the rate of breathing so it can get more oxygen every second.

      Smoking can also change the chemistry in your brain so that you will depend on the cigarettes to make the ‘feel-good’ receptors that make you happy work properly. That is why people become addicted to cigarettes.

      Last and not least, cigarette is a great way of giving yourself all sorts of cancer, not just lung cancer. The nasty chemicals in cigarettes can get into your blood stream and damage cells throughout the body. This will cause mutations and cancer might develop from them.

    • Photo: Sarah Thomas

      Sarah Thomas answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      These are also some of the immediate effects from smoking just one cigarette:

      – increases your blood pressure and heart rate
      – decreases the blood flow to your fingers and toes
      – the brain is stimulated for a short period of time and is then reduced.
      – Dizziness and nausea
      – weakened sense of taste and smell
      – loss of apetite.

      Longer term effects are:

      – Shortness of breath and coughing
      – Reduced fitness
      – Yellow stains on fingers and teeth
      – Prone to coughs and colds
      – difficulty recovering from illnesses
      – wrinkles on the face
      – infertility

      And also, it makes your hair, skin and clothes smell horrible.

      Here are a couple of websites that have more info:

      http://www.smokingadvice.info/smoking-advice/effects-of-smoking.php

      http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/healthyliving/smokingandtobacco/

    • Photo: Tim Millar

      Tim Millar answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Heart disease
      Lung disease
      Skin ageing
      Stroke
      Cancer
      Life expectancy reduced
      Low sperm count
      Reduced female fertility

      to name a few effects

    • Photo: Derek McKay-Bukowski

      Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      The others have already talked about the impact on you, but there are other impacts as well.

      It can affect others around you (passive smoking is also very dangerous). It also puts a big strain on the NHS and much money is being used up treating people who deliberately take up smoking, which could be better spent on treating other diseases that people cannot avoid through choice.

    • Photo: Tom Crick

      Tom Crick answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Lots of excellent answers here, but I do wonder why people pay so much money to inhale poisons!

      It has a massive effect on your body, especially nicotine in tobacco, but also a huge economic and social effect, such as the cost of treatment for smoking-related illnesses on the NHS.

      I get frustrated when I hear lots of statistics about illegal drugs, when the two biggest killers in the UK are two legal drugs: smoking and alcohol.

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