Ciggyfree Blog

Do you smoke? Thinking of quitting? Discovery Health lists seven reasons why you should. They might just persuade you ditch the smokes before it’s too late…

1. You smell pretty bad
Bad breath and body odor, sallow skin, smelly clothes, yellow teeth — what’s not to love? Maybe it is time stub it out.

2. Food doesn’t taste as good
Smoking can permanently harm your sense of smell, which in turns affects your tasting experience. This can be reversible, but you do run the risk of permanent damage to this sensory experience.

3. More time in hospital
The carcinogens released when you light up gives you a better chance to develop cancer of the mouth, lung and throat, and your basic flu easily turns into bronchitis or pneumonia. You are more likely to spend some quality time with healthcare professionals than a non-smoker.

4. Your body ages faster
Want to look nine years older than you actually are? Then have a cigarette, don’t exercise too much and just for good measure add a bit of weight to your frame. The good news is that it is reversible. If you stop smoking, do some mild exercise and lose the weight, you can look and also feel younger than your actual age.

5. Smoking harms your children
Smoking during pregnancy can lower your child’s IQ and lead to low birth weight, still births, miscarriages, birth defects such as cleft lip and sudden infant death syndrome (cot death). Cigarette smoke contains an estimated 4000 chemicals, with nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide thought to be the most dangerous to the fetus.

6. You have to exercise harder
Your lungs aren’t operating at full volume due to the tar and increased levels of carbon monoxide in your lungs. This poisonous gas is quickly absorbed into the blood, reducing its capacity to carry oxygen. As a result, the smoker has to exert more physical effort to attain a given task than does a non-smoker. The heart in particular must work harder, particularly during rigorous exercise. Increased levels of carbon monoxide in the blood can impair vision, perception of time, and co-ordination.

7. You can pass risks onto your kids
Like father like son… Most children of smokers will take up the habit as well or suffer the consequences of second-hand smoke.

This morning is cloudy, overcast, and drab day here in New England. I’ve been procrastinating about taking the a/c out while silently volleying around the house packing a few more boxes to accommodate this moving to parts unknown plan that I developed late this summer…

Settling down with a steaming cup of coffee, I perused my favorite Usenet quit group. While poking through the posts I became interested in a Freedom Village post that was offering a link to free mentor support to anyone who needed quit smoking assistance. Because the site hosted three advertisements (Wal-Mart, Overstocked, and Netflix):
the Freedom Village site owner (Bubba) was unfortunately rudely intercepted by a few posters.

So I got to thinking that if Freedom Village violated the compost rules (no commercial posts permitted on this newsgroup,) then that would make www.Silkquit.org also a violator of compost policy.

As an example of the direction my thinking is going in: when I clicked on the Silkquit meter page I could purchase a Quit Key for $59.95 or I could get hypnotized for $250.00. Check it out! Google ads rotate so you won’t see the same ads that I did when you visit www.silkquit.org

I also rediscovered that myopic thinking tends to infuriate me. This was another case of obviously palpable double standards. Wikipedia perhaps sums it up best.

“Willful ignorance is a bad faith decision to avoid becoming informed about something so as to avoid having to make undesirable decisions that such information might prompt.”

~robbster

Source: Jacob Sullum, Reason Magazine

Yesterday I mentioned the controversy over legislation that would give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products, authority the FDA itself (or at least its current head) does not want. One reason for the agency’s leeriness is the possibility that FDA regulation could actually increase the harm associated with tobacco use. One way that could happen, as I’ve noted before, is through censorship of truthful comparative risk claims—in particular, efforts to promote smokeless tobacco as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes. Last week there were a couple of positive developments in this area.