After One Million Cancer Causing Chemical Inhalations, Isn’t It Time To Stop Smoking?
One day I was thinking about smokers and I began to wonder why they rarely thought about quitting smoking. I began to think about how many really bad chemicals there must be in every puff of a cigarette. It reminded me of my brother who was a carpenter. He too in his line of work came across some pretty nasty and vile smelling products. Like the nasty smell of a new carpet, floor varnishes and glues, paints, caulks and all sorts of nasty smells that make you want to run outside. They even sold benzene in a can in the 1970′s. Now they know it causes cancer.
You may be in a field of work that brings you into contact with chemicals. Be sure you know what they are and what they can do. In my younger years I have worked at jobs where my boss, thought it was a good idea to mix bleach and ammonia. He thought, well if either are good by themselves, both together MUST be great! Right! Great for creating Toxic Chlorine Gas!
Where does this leave us with smoking? It is reported that there are over 4,000 chemicals in cigarettes. Of these, about 250 are said to cause cancer. Of that number about 50 are highly cancer causing. Lets look at the 250 number because that is the number of cancer causers associated with smoking cigarettes. So, every puff you actually come into contact not with one chemical that can cause cancer but up to 250. that means even one puff is bad enough. But, who lights a cigarette and takes one puff? Not many. There are about 10 puffs per cigarette. That means a smoker inhales 2,500 chemicals on average that could cause him cancer like right away. These chemicals damage cells and DNA. We know a good way to get cancer is to damage your DNA, it can mutate and cause cancer. Smoking, is like going out everyday of the year to get a sun burn. We know too that getting too many sunburns leads to DNA damage and that leads to cancer. When we smoke, the chemicals can attack our lips, tongue, throat, esophagus and stomach. Many of the chemicals dissolve and get into your blood stream, and there they can travel anywhere.
Now, we talked about smoking one cigarette, but it really never is one cigarette is it? Unfortunately it’s not just one puff or one cigarette. So, lets see, in one puff you get 250 nasty contacts. But a cigarette usually has at least 10 puffs. So, that means you get on average 2,500 exposures to cancer causers, in about a ten minute time frame. But, it doesn’t end there does it? Oh no! You still have 19 more cigarettes to go, and why let them go to “waste”? So, 2,500 cancer contacts per cigarette, and 20 cigarettes on average a day is 50,000 cancer causing contacts A DAY!
How many exposures do people get in a lifetime of smoking? We know that people smoke much longer than a day. In one day at the average of 20 cigarettes, they will consume 50,000 chemicals per pack. In a month that number sky rockets to an astonishing 1.5 Million exposures. In a year, it reaches 18 Million exposures. At some point, you have to realize that if you played the Lottery this way, you would be Bound to Win! But the nastiness continues. In ten years the average smoker, ingests a total of 180 Million cancer causing chemicals into his now frail body. And finally after 30 years, our smoker hits the amazing and at the same time horrible goal of 540 Million cancer causing chemicals having entered his body. Is it not just a bit amazing that many people achieve this? There is truly no doubt that this individual was sick many more days in his life than a non smoker, and probably has shaved 10-20 years off his life in total. But, even if that is not the case, his enjoyment of life has to have diminished.
The Cancer Causing Chemicals go Straight to Every Part of Your Body It is true that when you inhale smoke and all the cancer causing chemicals that go with it, you are sending them all over your body! Smoking sends these chemicals to the strong parts, to the weak parts, and to any random parts. There is No Control over what parts of a smokers body will come into contact with cancer causing chemicals once they are inhaled. But it should be obvious that many parts come into direct contact. All the way from a smokers lips, to the deepest recesses of his lungs will be irritated and accosted by the cancerous chemicals. But many will find their way into the blood stream, where they can and will reach everywhere. Therefore the best course of action is to quit smoking.
The Coach Quit iPhone application has been recently released. It is Free for a limited time. Download Coach Quit. This article, After One Million Cancer Causing Chemical Inhalations, Isn’t It Time To Stop Smoking? is available for free reprint.