Why is smoking bad for our health?
Smoking may be legal in Canada, but that doesn't mean it's good for us!
In fact, it's just the opposite: smoking is the only legal consumer
product that kills you when you use it exactly how it's meant to be
used! That's pretty scary, isn't it?
Cigarettes are made from tobacco. The tobacco plant is the only plant
ever discovered to contain the drug called nicotine. Nicotine is
a very strong poison that can kill a human in less than an hour if even
a small amount is injected into the blood-stream. Tobacco smoke contains
very tiny amounts of nicotine that aren't deadly, but are still very bad
for our health..
Tobacco smoke also contains many other chemicals. In fact, it contains
over 4,000 chemicals, many of which are very harmful to our bodies.
All of these chemicals mix together and form a sticky tar. It's
the tar that gives cigarette smoke it's smell and colour. The tar sticks
to clothing, skin, and the insides of our lungs!
Tar is very dangerous inside our lungs. It sticks to the cilia in
our lungs that are responsible for sweeping out germs and dirt. If the
cilia are covered in tar, they can't work right, and germs and dirt can
stay in the lungs and cause diseases.
The damage tar does to your cilia is only the beginning, though. The tar
and smoke are made up of many chemicals that are known to cause cancer, as
well as many chemicals that are just plain bad for you. Just a few of
these chemicals are:
Carbon Monoxide |
Nitrites |
Ammonia |
Nitros amines |
Hydrogen Cyanide |
Sulfur Compounds |
Vinyl Chloride |
Hydrocarbons |
Volatile Alcohols |
Urethane |
Formaldehyde |
Hydrazine |
With the nicotine and tar working together, there are a lot of bad diseases
linked to smoking cigarettes. Diseases like throat cancer,
mouth cancer, bladder cancer, lung cancer,
chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and heart disease are
all caused by smoking. In fact 40,000 Canadians die each year from
diseases caused by smoking. Each cigarette you smoke takes 5 to 8 minutes
of your life. Is it worth it? The following famous people died from
smoking:
- Humphrey Bogart (age 57)
- Jesse Owens (age 67)
- Louis Armstrong (age 71)
- Lucille Ball (age 77)
- Michael Landon (age 54)
- Nat "King" Cole (age 45)
- Sammy Davis Jr. (age 64)
- Walt Disney (age 65)
Unfortunately, even if you don't smoke, you can still get sick from
tobacco smoke. If you breathe the smoke from another person's cigarette,
it's as bad as if you were smoking the cigarette yourself! This smoke
is called second-hand smoke and it kills hundreds of people each
year in Canada. If your parents smoke, you have a greater chance of
getting ear infections, asthma, bronchitis, and
tonsillitis. Children who are exposed to smoke all their
lives have underdeveloped lungs, and they are two to four times as likely
to have allergic reactions and asthma than children of non-smokers.
Second-hand smoke is starting to really bother non-smokers, and that's
why there are more places where smoking isn't allowed than there used to
be. Now you aren't allowed to smoke on a plane, in a bus, or in many
buildings. Non-smokers want to breathe clean air!
Cigarettes aren't just bad for our health. They are bad for the
environment, too! Think of the amount of paper that goes into making each
cigarette. Canadian youth smoke about 6,000,000 cigarettes per day!
That's a lot of trees that are cut down, and the paper can never be recycled!
Look around outside. There are cigarette butts everywhere! Do you
know that it takes more than 5 years for a cigarette butt to biodegrade?
That means that it takes at least 5 years for the cigarette butts to
break down, unless someone cleans them up. Gross!
People are starving all over the world. If the land used to grow tobacco
was used to grow food instead, we could feed another 10 to 20
million people! What do you think is the better thing
to grow?
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