SMOKING KILLS essays

SMOKING KILLS essays Smoking is bad for your body and your overall health. There are many side affects that can hurt and even kill your body. It also can harm your lungs and make it hard for you to breathe. When you look at the statistics I dont understand why people do smoke. Cigarette smoking is the most important preventable cause of premature death in the United States. It accounts for about 430,700 of the more than 2 million annual deaths. Cigarette manufacturers spend millions of dollars every year to convince you and your children that smoking will make you exciting, athletic, important, sophisticated, and sexually attractive. They carefully avoid mentioning the intense addictive qualities of nicotine and the well-documented, serious health risks involved. Quitting smoking is the best preventive medicine: Experts estimate that stopping smoking is about 10 times more cost-effective at saving lives than even the best medical screening tests. The benefits are enormous. Your heart, lungs, and blood vessels have an amazing capacity to heal themselves when given the chance. When you stop smoking, your body starts repairing itself almost immediately. And with proper nutrition and activity, you can usually regain normal lung and heart functioning within a few years, regardless of how long you've been smoking. The risk of heart attack, stroke, and cancer starts dropping immediately. Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. These include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT. Most of the chemicals inhaled in cigarette smoke stay in the lungs. The more you inhale, the better it feels-and the greater the damage to your lungs. As a cigarette is smoked, the amount of tar inhaled into the lungs increases, and the last puff contains more than twice as much tar as the first puff. Carbon monoxi ...