Smoking Essay, Research Paper
My research paper is on smoking diseases and other consequences of smoking. Many times when people think of smoking diseases they think of heart disease and lung cancer. While those things are very true there are subtle things that happen also. Most of the time after someone has smoked their third cigarette they are hooked. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth. Usually once people start smoking they never stop.
Tobacco was found in the sixteenth century. Many Indian tribes were addicted to tobacco. When people came to America they became hooked on tobacco as well. Many sailors killed these Indians in order to get more of this addictive substance.
The three most harmful substances in a cigarette is tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide.
Tar is a very interesting chemical. When a cigarette remains unburned tar is not there. Only when the cigarette begins to burn does tar shows up as a chemical. While filters on the cigarette keep out a little bit of the tar, it is still very dangerous. The tar in the cigarette is actually the same as road tar.
Tar causes numerous types of cancer all over your body. One of the worse things that tar does is it fills up your lungs. The tar goes directly into your lungs and stays there forever. This is the reason why smokers can not inhale as much oxygen as nonsmokers can. The place where that extra air should go is now filled up with tar. Tar’s number one disease that it causes is emphysema.
Nicotine is the reason why people are addicted to cigarettes. Nicotine kills nerve endings and mucosae. Mucosae is the thin layer of skin in your nose and mouth that are full of blood cells. Nicotine goes straight to the brain. When the nicotine goes into the bloodstream it travels all over the body. That is why you can get cancer from smoking anywhere in your body. Nicotine is actually the least harmful out of all the chemicals in a cigarette Since people crave the nicotine though they ingest all of these other life-killing chemicals.
Carbon monoxide is a chemical in a gas form. Like tar it only appears when the cigarette is burned. Unlike nicotine, carbon monoxide does not go to the brain. Instead it goes to the lungs and straight into the bloodstream. When the carbon monoxide enters the lungs the body is deprived of the oxygen it needs.
One out of every six deaths are caused by smoking. In 1985 alone more than 400,000 people died from smoking. They died just because they wanted a dangerous substance in their body.
Many people believe that you have to be smoke free for a very long period of time for it to make any real difference. That is not true. Even if you do not smoke for twenty minutes it greatly benefits you.
When you do not smoke for twenty minutes your blood pressure goes back to normal, your pulse rate drops to normal, and your temperature increases back to normal. When you stop smoking for eight hours the carbon monoxide in your blood drops down to the normal amount and more oxygen goes into your blood. When you do not smoke for twenty-four hours the chance of having a heart attack or other serious heart problems, due to smoking, decreases.
If you do not smoke for fourty-eight hours the nerve endings, that were killed, start to regrow themselves; your ability to smell things and taste food is increased; also your ability to walk in a straight line becomes easier. When you stop smoking for two weeks to three months your blood circulation improves and your lungs functioning ability increases by 30%.
If you do not smoke from one to nine months your coughing, sinus infection, and shortness of breath decrease; your cilia in your lungs start to regrow which lets the body handle mucus better, it cleans the lungs, and reduces lung infections. When someone does not smoke for one year the risk of serious heart disease is half that of someone who still smokes.
The top five causes of death are heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases(mostly bronchitis and emphysema). Every single one of those reasons is usually caused by smoking. Even smoking causes a few accidents. When you smoke your reaction skills do not function as well as they should. Therefore, someone might be a little slow to stomp on the brake and have an accident.
There are about three reasons why heart disease occurs. Smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels are those three reasons. Not only is smoking the top cause of heart disease but smoking also cause high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Not just smoking causes high blood pressure and high cholesterol though. In the year of 1986, 765,000 people died from heart disease. More than 40% of those deaths would not have happened if people did not smoke.
Cancer is the second main cause of death. Over a half a million people die from cancer every year. 30% of that half a million deaths are from smoking and over 90% of deaths from lung cancer was caused by smoking. Besides lung cancer here are the most common cancers caused by smoking: bladder cancer, pancreas cancer, kidney cancer, larynx cancer, mouth cancer, esophagus cancer, and uterine cervix cancer.
The third main cause of death is strokes. Every year more than 150,000 people die from strokes. The main cause of strokes is again smoking.
The fifth main cause of death is chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. Every year around 80,000 people die from COPD. 80% to 90% of those deaths were caused by smoking.
Smoking effects the heart as well as the other organs of the body. Smoking is known the increase your chances of heart disease and heart attacks. Many people have bad hearts but when they smoke it makes their hearts worse.
Most people who smoke have high blood pressure. This is not a coincidence. The smoke you breathe in from the cigarettes make the arteries in your heart narrow down. Instead of your arteries being open to its fullest extent it becomes much smaller. This causes high blood pressure. After someone smoke for a very long period of time, doctors do not think that when they stop their blood pressure will return to normal. Although your blood pressure may remain the same your heart works easier which reduces your chance of a heart attack.
Smoking sometimes blocks the arteries of your heart which causes atherosclerosis. This disease happens when the circulation through your heart decreases rapidly. It usually only occurs when at least one artery is blocked. When you smoke not only does your blood pressure go up but you may end up blocking your heart arteries in the future. These two reasons are why many smokers will experience atherosclerosis sometime in their life.
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What many people do not realize is that smoking does not just give you cancer in your organs. Smoking can give you cancer in your throat, mouth, nose, and hip as well. Since the cigarettes harmful chemicals travel through your blood stream you can have cancer anywhere.
When doctors take the cancer out of your organs you do not see the end result. They have to actually dig out the cancer tumor. When you have cancer in your throat or face everyone can see the result. Huge gapping holes are everywhere because the cancer had to be carved out of your skin. After this you are deformed for the rest of your life. Many times the cancer even comes back. If the cancer should come back in the same place or near the same place there is usually nothing that anyone can do.
When you smoke the cancer can be anywhere. You could have cancer in your mouth and in your hip at the same time. Since the chemicals in the cigarette travel through your blood stream every part of your body gets infected. Some people are lucky. Some people do not die from smoking but in most cases the people who smoke do indeed die.
Many people know how cigarettes cause cancer and other problems with your organs. Now new studied are showing that cigarettes seriously damage your brain as well. When someone inhales nicotine from a cigarette it takes only ten seconds for it to reach the brain. It rides through your blood stream and passes through the barrier around the brain that is supposed to keep things out than can be harmful to the brain.
Nicotine’s signal is basically the same as one of the brains most important “signal chemicals”. When the nicotine goes into the brain it fills up all of this space on the brain that the real chemical needs. 1.5 milligrams of nicotine take up this space through just one cigarette.
With nicotine in your brain it can and does trigger many other chemicals to release into your body. So instead of these chemicals releasing naturally when needed, nicotine releases them when you do not need them. One of these chemicals is adrenaline.
The reason your body craves nicotine is also explained in your brain. After awhile these nicotine cells kill off many of the chemicals cells that it replaces in your brain. With so few of the real chemical left the brain needs the nicotine to function properly. The brain needs this chemical because it is the only thing that can tell the other chemicals in the body when to release itself into the body. Eventually the real chemical will increase to the necessary amount again but it takes awhile so while the brain is making more of the real chemical it keeps saying I need more which is usually why people continue to smoke.
When people go into shock from lack of nicotine it is because the brain is saying that it needs more of the chemical that has not had enough time to fully restore itself. People feel tired and nervous if they do not smoke and fill up the remaining space that is not yet taken up by the real chemical. The feel tired because there is not enough nicotine cells to falsely release the adrenaline the body is so used to. This is very dangerous because your brain ends up relying on nicotine.
Women suffer more bad effects from smoking than men suffer. If a women is using birth control pills while smoking she has a greater risk of developing a cardiovascular disease. If women smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a every day they have a higher chance of being unable to conceive a child. For women who can still have children the number of years that they could possibly conceive is drastically reduced because they smoke. Menopause usually starts a lot earlier than normal when a women smokes.
When a pregnant women smokes many dangerous side effects can happen to her unborn child. A few of the problems that can happen are premature labor, problems with breathing, and death. These things can even happen when the father smokes and the wife does not smoke.
At least 30% of babies that are born to women who smoked during pregnancy are very underweight . Their birth weight is always at least seven ounces less than a normal baby which can cause other problems. The reason the baby is smaller is because it got too much carbon monoxide and not enough oxygen.
Around 14% of pre-mature deliveries are from women who are smoking while pregnant. Also about 10% of all miscarriages happen to women who smoked while pregnant . The chance of having a miscarriage is actually greater with women who smoke while pregnant. Their chance of having a miscarriage is about twice the chance of a women who does not smoke while pregnant.
The nicotine and carbon monoxide that the women inhales goes straight to the placenta. This also prevents the fetus from getting all of the different nutrients and oxygen that it needs to be able to be healthy at birth. The nicotine is still feed to the baby after he is born. When a mother, who smoked through pregnancy, breast feeds her baby nicotine is transferred to the baby. All of this can happen even when the women herself does not smoke, but her husband does.
Some other problems that usually occur are congenital malformation, bleeding in the womb, rupture of membranes, and SIDS. While growing up these children will continue to have problems. Most of them will have brain function disorders, psychological abnormalities, hyperactivity, asthma, more colds, bronchitis, and respiratory diseases.
Lately there have been more teenage smokers than ever before. Companies are making their cigarette adds more noticeable to teenagers which is taking a deadly toll. The reason why many kids feel the need to smoke is peer pressure. Kids see older kids or their friends smoking so they smoke too. For teenage girls there is usually a different reason. They want to lose weight or they want people to think that they are glamorous, like a movie star.
Today there are going to be one thousand adults who die from smoking while they were a teenager. Those one thousand people wanted to be cool or maybe lose weight so they started smoking. Unfortunately those one thousand people are going to die for it today. The really sad part is that three thousand teenagers will start smoking today taking the place of those one thousand adults who died.
Not only do you endanger yourself, other people and your children but people who smoke cigarettes usually end up addicted to other drugs like marijuana. No matter what anyone says, smoking is a wrong.
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