Tag Archives: lung cilia

Cigarettes in a Pile

How Much Tar in That Cigarette?

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The yellow stains on a smoker’s fingers and teeth is caused by the tar that results from smoking tobacco.

Tar causes great damage to a person’s lungs as it kills the cilia, affecting breathing ability.

The accumulation of this substance can be difficult to imagine, but a graphic video demonstrates for people the levels of tar that is extracted from approximately 20 packs of cigarettes.

Smoking Video Shows Tar Extraction

The video Still Smoking? Watch This! shows an experiment where almost 400 cigarettes are “smoked” through water using a vacuum. The water turns brown and then eventually black as the tar is extracted from the cigarettes. The more “tarry” the water, the more smoke is trapped as well.

Cigarettes in a PileThe experimenters then boil the tar water. After the water as evaporated, only the thick black tar remains. After letting the substance dry, the result is a sticky, crusty tar crust.

This experiment was done to stimulate what substance settles in a smoker’s lungs.

More Reason to Quit Smoking

The cigarettes used in this experiment contained 18 mg of tar. Cigarette companies manufacture cigarettes in three categories:

  • low tar cigarettes with 7 mg of tar or less
  • medium tar cigarettes with 15 to 21 mg of tar
  • high tar cigarettes with 22 mg of tar or more

Cigarettes contain over 4,00 chemicals, including more than 40 known carcinogens. Tar in cigarettes is the byproduct of smoking tobacco. Tar build up in the lungs causes damage as it prevents proper functioning. The accumulation of tar in a smoker’s body contributes to several health problems, including the following few:

  • emphysema
  • bronchitis
  • lung cancer
  • chronic respiratory disease
  • mouth cancer
  • throat cancer.

Watch the video Still Smoking?

See for yourself the amount of tar that’s produced

Video Demonstrates How Smoking Destroys Your Lungs

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Lung cancer accounts for approximately one third of cancer deaths in the American population.

Over $10 billion is spent annually on the diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer.

The majority of people with this disease are smokers, but former smokers and people exposed to secondhand smoke are still at risk.

What Smoking Does to Your Lungs

Smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke causes the invasion of over 4,000 chemicals into the lungs through the mouth and nose. These chemicals are deposited as tar in the lungs, sticking to the cilia. The function of the “hair-like” cilia is to keep the airways and lungs clean. When covered with tar, the cilia dies off. Germs and dirt do not get cleaned out and there is an accumulation of mucous. “Smoker’s Cough” is attributed to dead cilia. When dirty mucous clogs the airways and blocks the inhalation and exhalation of breath, a person’s reaction is to cough.

Long Term Effects of Smoking on the Lungs

Smoking destroys the body in many ways. A few of the long term consequences to the lungs caused by smoking and continued exposure to secondhand smoke includes:

  • emphysema
  • cancer
  • bronchitis
  • asthma
  • chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

To see the difference in functioning between healthy lungs and tumor-covered lungs, watch the following video:

Smoking Cigarettes Effects on Lung Health

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Every time you inhale smoke from a cigarette, you kill some of the alveoli, or the air sacks in your lungs.

These air sacks are where the oxygen that you breathe in is transferred into your blood.

The alveoli will not grow back.

So if you destroy them, you permanently have destroyed part of your lungs.

Alveoli Lung Air Sacks ImageSmoking paralyzes the cilia that line your lungs.

Cilia are little hair like structures that move back and forth to sweep particles out of your lungs. When you smoke, the cilia can not move and can not do their job.

So dust, pollen, and other things that you inhale they sit in your lungs and build up.

Also, there are a lot of particles in smoke that get into your lungs. Since your cilia are paralyzed because of the smoke and can not clean them out, the particles sit in your lungs and form tar.