This one is a big deal to me. It's directly related to deaths in my family.
On my father's side of the family, we do not have an increased chance of developing cancer if we smoke.
That's right. You read that correctly. We do not have an increased chance of developing cancer. We have an eradicated chance of not developing cancer. In my family, if you smoke, you lose all chance of remaining cancer-free.
I've made that very, very clear to my son. I've also told him where it likes to hit. Cigarettes kick us right in the butt. We get colon cancer. We get other cancers, too, but that one is the most prominent and the hardest hitting. It hits when we are under forty years of age, way before insurance companies approve testing.
I now have found a study to cite regarding another point I made in my anti-smoking talk with my son.
Smoking causes gene damage in minutes
AFP
According to the news story, a U.S. study published in the peer-reviewed journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, cancer causing chemicals are found in the bloodstream just minutes after a cigarette is smoked.
This does not come as a great surprise to me. Twenty-five years ago in seventh grade health class, when we covered (and ridiculed) "huffing" in drug ed, I mentioned smoking in conjunction with the lesson. At first, my teacher, a smoker, disagreed, while still trying to discourage the students from starting the habit. She seemed to think that the comparison chipped away at the seriousness with which the dangers of "huffing" should be taken, but I insisted that it was the other way around. It wasn't that "huffing" was no worse than smoking, but that smoking was as dangerous and stupid as "huffing." In the end, my class all came to the agreement that though "huffing" does its damage directly to the brain, while smoking's damage takes longer to kill, both activities do put chemicals directly into the bloodstream the same way breathing enriches the blood with oxygen. The effects of smoking don't do immediate brain damage, but they do eventually lead to a deadly illness, and therefore, smoking is as dangerous as "huffing."
The study basically points out what I pointed out that day. It is your lungs' job to transfer molecules from the air you breathe into your bloodstream. If it works with "huffing," that means any chemical in the air you breathe would get transferred the same way. There are a lot of chemicals in cigarettes. If nicotine is getting through, so is everything else in the smoke. The bottom line: When you smoke, you are "huffing" nicotine, tar, toxic flavoring chemicals, and other chemicals found in cigarette smoke.
Maybe it shouldn't have taken a study to figure that out, but given the fact that, despite all of the education efforts of the last thirty years, young people are still picking up the habit, it may take something more obvious, like a study that proves the huffing effect, to get the point across.
