Want An Early Death? Just Keep Smoking.
There was a time when smoking a cigarette was kind of the "chic"
and fashionable thing to do in many social environments. During
many years (and still today) there was kind of a social
conditioning for smoking. It was like wearing a nice suit or a
fashionable hat. Something everyone should "use" if they ever
wanted to be included in the "winners" side at the end of the
game. Regretfully, the game is over already for many smokers
that had to suffer the most common consequence of smoking, i.e.,
an early death.
The most active ingredient in a cigarette and the one that is
involved in causing the heavy addictive characteristics of
tobacco is the naturally occurring liquid alkaloid better known
as Nicotine.
While there are thousands of chemicals in a single cigarette,
including the naturally occurring ones and also those added by
cigarette manufacturers, it is one, Nicotine, that produces all
the good feelings that draw people back for another cigarette or
plug of tobacco, again and again.
In the standard procedures of cigarette manufacturing, producers
use tobacco where Nicotine normally makes up about 5 percent of
the plant by weight. Just packed cigarettes, contain 8 to 20
milligrams (mg) of nicotine (depending on the brand you prefer
to smoke), but only approximately 1 mg is actually absorbed by
your body when you smoke a cigarette.
But you do not need industrial amounts of Nicotine in your body
in order to become addicted to cigarette. This minimal quantity
of Nicotine that you absorb with each cigarette you smoke is
more than enough to make you eternally beg for more, and more
again.
Nicotine readily diffuses into your body through the following
channels: Skin, Lungs and the Mucous membranes such as the
lining of your nose or your gums. That's why you will get
equally addicted to nicotine even if you just chew and spit
tobacco.
The path Nicotine follows into your body starts right into the
small blood vessels that line the tissues covering the channels
mentioned above. From there, nicotine travels through your
bloodstream and then it safely arrives to the brain, and then is
delivered to the rest of your body.
Even considering that Nicotine takes a lot of different actions
throughout the smokers body (many of them very bad), what it
does once it has arrived to the brain is responsible for both
the good feelings you get from smoking, as well as the
irritability you feel if you try to quit; i.e., the brain
becomes addicted. Within 10 to 15 seconds of inhaling the smoke
of your cigarette, you will probably be in the throes of
nicotine's effects.
Nicotine initially causes a rapid release of Adrenaline, the
"fight-or-flight" hormone. The effects of this hormone are the
familiar: Rapid heartbeat, increased blood pressure, and rapid,
shallow breathing. All this state of high alertness caused by
adrenaline also tells your body to dump some of its glucose
stores into your blood.
And if we consider that Nicotine itself may also block the
release of the hormone insulin. This all means that nicotine
puts people in a hyperglycemic state, having more sugar than
usual in their blood torrent. So you become kind of a part-time
diabetic with each cigarette you smoke and with the long term
consequences this condition brings.
This is not all because over the long haul, as you keep smoking
and absorbing nicotine everyday, this can increase the level of
the "bad" cholesterol (LDL) in your blood which will in
consequence cause great damage to your arteries. And this will
make it more likely that over time, and this is not a very long
time, you could have a heart attack or a stroke.
The health problems associated with using nicotine-containing
products are far worse than any benefits you may feel at the
beginning. The average person will be in high risk of; Lung
Cancer, Heart Disease, Stroke and Emphysema. It should be
mentioned that many of these illnesses are actually caused by
other chemicals in cigarette smoke or in smokeless tobacco
products, different to Nicotine. The biggest problem with
nicotine is how easily it makes you become dependent on smoking
or chewing tobacco. Which also brings up the conclusion that
Nicotine-free cigarettes are not much healthier, maybe less
addictive but equally dangerous.
The position of the medical and scientific communities world
wide is that nicotine is definitely addictive. Nicotine meets
both the psychological and physiological characteristics of what
we call an addiction.
When trying to quit smoking you will surely have this symptoms,
arising due to the lack of nicotine in your blood stream.
Irritability , Anxiety, Depression, Craving for nicotine. And
yes, no one denies it; quitting cigarette smoking can be a real
nightmare for many people.
For many smokers, even a day without Nicotine is excruciating.
Statistics indicate that every year, millions of people try to
break the nicotine habit but only 10 percent of them succeed.
Will you succeed?