Smoking, Why Quit And How To Quit

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Cigarette smoking involves wrapping dried leaves of the plant Nicotiana tabacum with the common name tobacco in a paper in a cylindrical form. This is then burnt and the smoke inhaled.

Tobacco is indigenous to North and South America, Australia, South-West Africa, and South Pacific. The tobacco plant contains over 600 ingredients and when burnt also releases over 7000 chemicals out of which 250 chemicals are known to be poisonous of which 70 are carcinogenic.

Some of the chemicals found in tobacco include;

• NICOTINE
• CARBON MONOXIDE
• ACETONE
• BUTANE
• ARSENIC
• ETC.

Between 1-2 milligrams of NICOTINE from the lungs get into the bloodstream per each cigarette you smoke. Within 7-10 seconds, nicotine gets to the brain and triggers a lot of chemical reactions to excite the smoker, it creates a sense of pleasure but this pleasure is short-lived.

As nicotine levels decline in the bloodstream, the smoker becomes anxious and impatient which is due to nicotine withdrawal.

In order to deal with this discomfort, the smoker lights up another cigarette hence the addictive nature of tobacco

Carbon monoxide which is a poisonous chemical also present in cigarette has the ability to bind to heamoglobin in the smoker’s red blood cells. This prevents the cells from carrying all the oxygen they supposed to carry leading to hypoxia (a condition in which there is deprived of adequate oxygen to the organs and tissues of the body). When the tissues of the body lack adequate oxygen, there is tissue death and also, a condition known as oxidative stress sets in, causing DNA mutation which also paves way for cancer development

WHY QUIT SMOKING
Cigarette smoking is associated with a lot of health risks. It affects almost every organ in the human body, from the hair to the feet. Some diseases a smoker can suffer from include the following;

• Coronary Heart Disease
• Stroke
• COPD
• Lung cancer
• ETC

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Cigarette smoking also has effect on PREGNANCY

• Women who smoke struggle to get pregnant
• Mothers who smoke are more likely to deliver PRETERM as well as low birth weight babies
• Smoking cigarette while pregnant leads to deformed babies

HOW TO QUIT SMOKING
Tobacco smoking is addictive and has serious health implications. Because of the addictive nature of tobacco, it is advisable not to start smoking at all in the first place but if you’re already a smoker, all hope is not lost.

• To quit smoking, you must first make the decision to quit and do it with a conviction
• The best way to quit smoking is to stop it all at once, for it is better to suffer the withdrawal symptoms for the first few days than to drag it for months.
• Get rid of all your smoking partners and items associated with tobacco such as ash tray, images of people smoking etc.

Reference; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

The writer is a medical herbalist
HMO. Alfred Abowine
[email protected]