Smoking and Anti-Aging

Today, the term smoking refers to smoking a cigarette, or possibly a cigar. I'm sure if you asked someone, even just a 150 years ago, "Do you smoke?", they would look at you as if you had lost your mind, unless of course, he thought you were talking about the meat that was hanging in the smoke house. But in our time it is a word that you here or read multiple times a day. Normally in conjunction with the cessation of smoking, like, "here's how you can quit", which is how I'm using it in this discussion of smoking and anti-aging.

The first thing that I think of when the subject of smoking and anti-aging comes up is not the ravages of smoking on your skin, which is important as well, but the fact that you may not get a chance to even worry about anti-aging if you start young and don't stop. My dad started smoking before the health warnings occurred back in the 60's. He started when he was about 18, in the navy during WWII. Everybody did it back in the day.

Today we know so much more about what cigarettes, and other tobacco products also, do to our health, you would think that everyone would quit, but smokers are addicted to what was referred to in Star Wars as "death sticks", an appropriate description.

My dad was so hooked and cigarette smoking was so prevalent, that even after his first heart attack at age 39, he was only able to stop smoking for a short time, by the time he got back to his business and was surrounded by smokers, he started back up again and ended up with a 3 pack a day habit. He didn't need to worry about anti aging, he had his last, massive heart attack at 44. I remember a saying, horrible though it may be, that is appropriate, "die young and make a good looking corpse." He did.

Today we know so much more about what smoking does to our health, including aging. There would be no excuse for lighting up, if not for the addiction factor. Never having smoked, just watched people around me die with smoking as a contributing factor, I can't even imagine how difficult it must be to quit. But it is so important to continue to try until you finally are able to give up smoking forever.

Quit smoking so you have a future where you can think about anti-aging.

Even though the idea of smoking has been around since before recorded history, it was mainly used for rituals and ceremonies. Smoking effects have become one of the biggest health problems since industrialization, when it became possible to churn out cigarettes by the millions, cheaply and efficiently. And just as efficiently, that industry was able to gain more and more customers who were addicted to cigarette smoking. Finally, in the 1960's the danger of smoking was highlighted and "big tobacco" was instructed to put warning labels on their products and this started a national and international discussion about the effects of smoking. These effects of smoking are seen, not only in individual's lives, but in the costs of health care, everyone's health care.

For the past 45 years the percentage of smokers has fallen, though any amount is too much. According to Answers.com:

"Smokers constitute a minority, and a shrinking one. The annual prevalence of cigarette smoking among adults in the United States declined 40 percent from 1965 to 1990 (from 42.4 percent to 25.5 percent), but was virtually unchanged from 1990 to 1992. In 1999, an estimated 48 million adults (23.5 percent) were current smokers. Epidemiologic data suggest that more than 70 percent of the nearly 50 million smokers in the United States today have made at least one prior attempt to quit, and approximately 46 percent try to quit each year. Most smokers make several quit attempts before they successfully kick the habit."