Posted in: Health Studies Posted: February 25, 2015

Smokers Die An Average Of Ten Years Earlier: It’s Worse Than Originally Thought...........

GOT TO LOVE THIS YUM.....               

By now, everyone in the country, from children to elderly, knows that smoking cigarettes is bad for your health. They may even be able to list some of the reasons to quit. Smoking increases your risk of lung cancer, causes hypertension, may lead to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and secondhand smoke is bad for everyone around the smoker because it leads to the same health problems.

While smoking is a matter of health, it is also a matter of culture. The difficulty that the U.S. and other countries are having is that many people who smoke started smoking at a time when smoking was considered socially acceptable, and even during the early days of concerns about smoking, it was not nearly as socially unacceptable as it is today.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was considered sophisticated to sit and chat with your cigarette. Things started to change in the 1970s and 1980s as new evidence was presented regarding the health risks of smoking, but even then, the reaction to smoking was a collective “meh.” It really wasn’t until the 1990s that major changes began happening. After decades of denial, there were smoking bans and surgeon general warnings everywhere, along with a ton of research-based evidence that was “in your face,” announcing to everyone that smoking was very bad indeed.
However, by this time, we had two groups of people of dedicated smokers. One group was those who started smoking long ago and were very addicted to nicotine, and the other group was those who were young and rebellious and felt that nothing bad could happen to them as is developmentally appropriate for their age. The problem was, and still is, that the latter group turns into the former group, and the cycle repeats in the next generation.
While there are many ways that people are able to accomplish quitting smoking, one of the first steps is to understand exactly how bad smoking really is. And new research has found it’s worse than we had ever imagined.
One study suggests that two-thirds of smokers will die early if the don’t quit. Emily Banks, scientific director of the Sax study and a researcher at the Australian National University, says that while that is alarming news, the good news is that people can gain “life years” back if they quit, according to Philly.com.

“We knew smoking was bad, but we now have direct independent evidence that confirms the disturbing findings that have been emerging internationally. Even with the very low rates of smoking that we have in Australia, we found that smokers have around threefold the risk of premature death of those who have never smoked. We also found smokers will die an estimated 10 years earlier than nonsmokers.”

Other studies have found similar findings, and the first step is acceptance of what these research findings show. Brian Carter, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, says that recent research shows that smoking deaths may be greatly underestimated.
“The Surgeon General’s report claims 480,000 deaths directly caused by smoking, but we think that is really quite a bit off,” Carter said, adding that they believe direct smoking-caused deaths are more accurate at 540,000 a year. “60,000 deaths is really quite a lot.”
When one considers the emotional, financial, familial, and psychological effects that just one person’s death can cause, sixty thousand is a lot indeed. For more information on how to quit smoking, you can read here.