A Product Designed To Kill You
How hard is it to quit the most highly addictive drug- nicotine?
The Today Show is partnering with the American Legacy Foundation to produce a series on quitting smoking - “Today Calls it Quits.”
Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Today’s medical editor, reminds us that President Obama is trying to quit smoking and in the series we meet others - Joe, 27, who smokes half a pack a day on the weekday, and a full pack daily on the weekend.
Mauricio, 32-years-old is a pack a day smoker who has smoked 15 years. Both are subjected to testing at a lab and on camera by Dr. Peter Shields, head of Georgetown University’s Human Smoking Lab.
Dr. Shields says when we smoke we keep the smoke inside the mouth for a few seconds then inhale. “We will literally bathe the lungs with the carcinogens and other poisons. From there it either damages the cells in the lungs or some of those chemicals get into the blood stream and from there it travels to your pancreas, your heart, to your bladder, your kidneys. Every organ that you look at you will see damage from smoking.”
Still, more than 43 million Americans smoke. Smoking will kill 400,000 Americans this year and 547,000 teens will pick up the habit ever year.
Dr. Shields' team monitors the men as they smoke, calculating the amount of carbon monoxide they take in before and after their smoke. Carbon monoxide doubled in Mauricio from seven to 14 parts per million (ppm) and is a known poison in cigarettes which accumulates in lungs and other organs.
Joe, the social smoker observes the amount of dark brown accumulated tar from one cigarette, while his CO2 level jumped from 4 ppm to 11 ppm from one cigarette. Normal is one ppm. “That scares me that there,” Joe says.
60 chemicals are in cigarettes including cadmium, lead, and arsenic - all likely carcinogens included in the legal substance, reminds Dr. Shields who calls cigarettes, “A product when used as intended is designed to kill you.”
The two men are still smoking, Dr. Snyderman says.
Risk of heart attack and stroke drop after a decade of not smoking and a profusion of oxygen and carbon monoxide starts to repair the body immediately, she says.
The American Legacy Foundation says in order to quit you must understand the triggers to smoking for you, and realize it’s okay to take medication to counter the influence of the addictive nature of another drug, nicotine.
As far as second hand smoke – the American Legacy Foundation reports on news from the Social Climate Survey conducted by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and Mississippi State University in November, 2008.
They find that more than 63 percent of smoking parents report their child has been exposed to secondhand smoke in the past week. Only half of parents who smoke do so outside of the home. And 27% and 21% reported that their child had been exposed to secondhand smoke in their home and vehicle in the past week, respectively.
The Foundation is dedicated to communicating about the dangers of smoking to help people reject tobacco and help people quit.
ALF was created as a result of the November 1998 Master Settlement Agreement reached between the attorneys general from 46 states and the tobacco industry. #