Smoking is not only hazardous to your health—it can be hazardous to your job prospects as well. Twice as many smokers are out of work as nonsmokers. Though few will admit it, most employers would reject a smoker competing for a job with an equally qualified nonsmoker.
Are Risks of Smoking Exaggerated?
No way! For example, smokers at Dow Chemical, when compared to nonsmokers, had six days more absenteeism, eight days more disability, and 12 percent more illness.
The hard facts consistently point to tobacco as the deadliest drug in the world. On average it kills about 480,000 Americans a year—more than all who die from AIDS, street drugs, fires, car crashes, and homicides combined. This includes 41,000 involuntary smokers—persons forced to breathe secondhand smoke.
Smoking Causes Lung Cancer. How?
Normally your lungs’ air passages are lined with millions of tiny hairs called cilia. These cilia act like little brooms protecting the air tubes by sweeping dusts, tar, and other foreign materials gradually upward, like escalators, until they can be spit out.
Every time a blast of tobacco smoke hits these cilia, however, they slow down, and soon stop moving. As a result, the trapped tars from the tobacco smoke begin boring into the cells lining the air tubes. Over time, this constant irritation turns some of the cells cancerous.
This transformation takes many years. But once it begins, the cancer steadily eats its way deeper into the lung. By the time it is discovered, it’s usually too late. And yet, lung cancer is not the leading cause of death in smokers.
Smoking & Atherosclerosis. How?
Tobacco causes 128,000 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States. In contrast, smoking is responsible for 155,000 heart attacks and strokes; plus, another 41,000 who took in the smoke second hand as involuntary smokers.
The nicotine and carbon monoxide in tobacco smoke are the main culprits that promote vascular disease. Nicotine constricts small arteries depriving the heart, brain, lungs, and other important areas of vital oxygen. Nicotine also produces a sense of relaxation and well-being—smoking’s main appeal. But nicotine is also addictive.
Carbon monoxide interferes directly with the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. This causes shortness of breath, lack of endurance, and acceleration of atherosclerosis (narrowing and hardening of the arteries).
And More…
Unfortunately, there is a lot more.
• Smokers have much more cancer of the mouth, larynx, esophagus, pancreas, bladder, kidneys, and cervix than do nonsmokers.
• Emphysema gradually destroys lung tissue, producing death by suffocation. In the United States 110,000 of these grisly deaths occur each year as a result of smoking.
• Ulcers of the stomach and duodenum are 60 percent more common in smokers.
• Smoking pulls calcium out of the skeleton, accelerating the bone-thinning process known as osteoporosis.
• Smoking during pregnancy has an adverse effect on fetal development and increases the risk of death after birth by up to 35 percent.