10 May The effects of tobacco and how to be Smoke Free
Have you ever been told that smoking is bad for your health, and that you should quit now before you get addicted and it’s too late? Fear not, this is not one of those scary news features with chilling warnings. Instead, this one is going to focus on every day smokers – their stories and their cravings, plus a few curious facts about smoking.
Meet David Holloway and Krzysztof Nowicki – two people worlds away from each other but have one thing I common, they both have been smoking for over 30 years.
Dave is a 70 years old pensioner who smokes over 30 cigarettes per day and confesses that he does enjoy smoking sometimes but most of the time, however, he smokes purely out of boredom.
Dave shares: “I think is just because I get bored, nothing else to do. Just going to cigarettes, it helps you relax a bit. If I didn’t smoke I would be nervous.”
Every morning, while enjoying the company and playing with his two cats, David smokes between two and three cigarettes with the morning tea. Going back in time, he still remembers how distasteful his first cigarette was but then it gave him the craving for after.
Krzysztof is a 47 years old man who works in the gambling sector. He, on the other hand, likes to first have a breakfast and leave the coffee and cigarettes for after that. Krzysztof consider himself an average smoker – he doesn’t really ever get to twenty cigarettes per day, unless he goes out with friends for a drink. He adds:
“I smoke to take a break from the routine. It is like a pre-text, smoke a cigarette to take a break from something that you are doing.”
For Krzys, the first puff ever was when he was fourteen years old, and it made him feel so sick that he didn’t even considered going to get back to it. But he did, within a week.
Now, it is not like David and Krzysztof have been trying to quit over the years. They have tried everything – from patches to chewing gums, and they had stopped, and then came back to it again. They both complain of various disturbing symptoms they relate to tobacco, so they have both decided to take an action. David is considering going to one of the Stop Smoking services funded by the NHS, and Krzysztof believes all he needs is will, so he is looking for a motivation to quit now.
“Smoking is actually the biggest preventable cause of cancer worldwide”, said to me Clare Hyde, a Health Information Officer for Cancer Research UK.
The divesting harm of tobacco, she says, is clear regardless of what type and number of cigarettes you smoke, there is no safe level of smoking. Interestingly enough, “the longer you smoke has a greater effect on your overall risk of cancer or the overall harm of tobacco, compared to the overall cigarettes you have.”, said Clare.
This means that if you “if you stop at very early ages, so if you stop before the age of 30 your risk can come back down close to how it would be if you have never smoked.
“It is never too late to quit because even if you’re 60 years old you can gain up to ten years life by stopping.”
