Top 5 Reasons to Quit Smoking | Benefits of Quitting Smoking

The BIGGEST reason to quit smoking is the most obvious one - smoking is extremely bad for your health. Tobacco smoke contains over 7000 chemicals, including toxic hundreds, and about 70 that can cause cancer, meaning they are carcinogenic.

⏩ Timestamps
00:00 - Start
00:11 - Why Smoking is Bad for your Health
06:32 - Smoking Affects the way you look & the way you smell
06:47 - Smoking Affects the Health of others
08:35 - Smoking Costs a lot of Money
09:01 - Benefits of Quitting Smoking
10:04 - What Happens to your body when you quit Smoking
10:27 - Why is it so hard to quit smoking cigarettes
14:00 - Quitting Smoking with vaping is helpful?

3 hazardous chemicals; that is tar, nicotine, & carbon monoxide. Tar is a substance that becomes sticky in the lungs & tar itself is actually made up of many chemicals known to be carcinogens. Carbon monoxide is a colorless & odorless gas that binds to the hemoglobin in your blood & therefore allows less oxygen to bind to the hemoglobin in your blood & ultimately results in less oxygen being delivered to the tissues in your body.

Finally, nicotine is an addictive chemical that gets into the bloodstream and travels to all body parts, including the brain. For example, when someone smokes cigarettes, the nicotine they inhale gets absorbed by the blood in the capillaries in the lungs. It then gets delivered to different parts of the body when the heart pumps it into the arteries.

But what about if someone is not smoking and instead you will say they are chewing tobacco or snuffing? Well, that nicotine gets absorbed mainly through the mouth's mucous membranes and ultimately still makes its way to the brain, but this is a slower process. Still, because it is constantly being absorbed, it has a steady-state in the bloodstream and has a steady effect on the brain. So, it is a more consistent effect of nicotine on the brain. Either way, whenever nicotine is in your bloodstream and ultimately makes its way to the brain, it activates receptors in the brain’s reward and motivation center.

This nicotine gives pleasurable feelings, but the brain needs more and more nicotine to get more and more of those pleasurable feelings over time. When the body eventually breaks down the nicotine in your system, you have less nicotine in the body. When that nicotine goes away, the withdrawal symptoms develop when the cravings develop. So, the withdrawal symptoms include difficulty concentrating, nervousness, anxiety, and irritability which can cause sleep problems and cause headaches, dizziness, and increased appetite.

Of course, this only makes people want to smoke to get that nicotine in their bodies. Nicotine comes in different forms, but ultimately, all nicotine forms are not good for your health. When it comes to smoking, whether from cigarettes, water pipes, or cigars - tobacco puts you at higher risk for all sorts of diseases. Inhalation of tobacco smoke entails inhaling toxic gases and particles of tar and eventually damages the lungs.

Not only can it cause damage to the lungs so that people develop inflammation of the airways - meaning bronchitis, but they can also develop different forms of pneumonia, in addition to COPD and emphysema. It can also contribute to other types of lung disease, something we call interstitial lung disease.

It includes things like pulmonary fibrosis, where you have scarring of the lungs. It can cause noninfectious types of pneumonia, such as acute eosinophilic pneumonia, in addition to desquamative interstitial lung disease and RB-ILD. Smokers are more likely to get respiratory viruses like cold, flu, and COVID 19.

Smoking also dramatically raises the risk of having coronary artery disease, including raising the risk of having a heart attack but also raises the risk of disease affecting blood vessels in other parts of the body, such as blood vessels in the brain, and that is why it raises the risk of stroke, also raises the risk of peripheral artery disease where you have constriction of the arteries in the legs making it painful to walk.

It is interesting to note that women are more likely to develop lung cancer than men regarding smoking and cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women; it claims more women’s lives than breast cancer, cervical cancer, uterine cancer, and ovarian cancer combined. Also, women who smoke have a harder time getting pregnant compared to women who don’t smoke. Women who smoke during pregnancy are more likely to have an underweight baby, defined as less than 5-1/2 pounds. Low-birth-weight babies are much more likely to die during the first month of life than normal-weight babies.

Doctor Mike Hansen, MD
Internal Medicine | Pulmonary Disease | Critical Care Medicine
Website: https://doctormikehansen.com/
Doctor Hansen's Courses: https://doctormikehansen.com/courses/

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