Dangers of smoking | Health | Biology | FuseSchool
Did you know that smokers are twice as likely to have a heart attack? And that one in two smokers will die from a smoking-related disease.
In fact all of these things are negatively affected by smoking… pretty much every organ in your body!
Circulation; Heart; Lungs; Mouth and throat; Stomach; Brain; Skin; Reproduction and fertility; Bones
We all know that smoking is bad, but do you know why?
That’s what we’re going to discover in this video.
When you pass someone smoking, does it make you cough or your chest feel tight?
Perhaps you thought it was the smell? It’s actually because you’re inhaling dangerous substances into your body.
Nicotine is a toxin that stimulates your body to produce adrenaline. This increases your heart rate and raises your blood pressure, thus making your heart work harder. It is also addictive, which is why it’s very difficult for smokers to quit.
Tar contains over a thousand chemicals. It forms a tacky brown or yellow residue – which is why some smokers have stained teeth. And if you could see them – stained lungs too.
Some of the chemicals in tar are carcinogens – so they cause cancer, making lung, mouth and throat cancers more common in smokers.
The last culprit you need to know about is Carbon Monoxide. It is an odourless, colourless and extremely poisonous gas. The carbon monoxide permanently binds to haemoglobin in your blood, blocking oxygen from binding.
So oxygen can’t be transported around the body and used for respiration, causing shortness of breath and fatigue. Your heart once more has to beat even faster to supply the body with the oxygen it needs.
Let’s now look at some diseases caused by smoking…
Emphysema is when the tiny structures in your lungs called alveoli, break down.
As alveoli are responsible for gas exchange, this is not good news. The inhaled smoke causes the walls of the alveoli to weaken and decrease in surface area, making gas exchange less efficient. Unsurprisingly, breathing becomes much harder and smokers are much more at risk of coughs and chest infections.
Smoking also causes the cilia in the lungs to become irritated, and produce excess mucus.
So that’s the lungs. And we saw earlier that nicotine and carbon monoxide make the heart work much harder.
Now the blood vessels.
Plaque building up in the coronary arteries, so the ones that transport oxygen rich blood around the heart, can over time cause a blood clot to form, which cuts off some of the heart muscle and causes it to die. This is the most common cause of heart attacks.
So we’ve seen that smoking increases your risk of heart, lung, kidney disease, strokes and cancers.
Smoking can also make your bones more brittle and so more likely to break. And also it can greatly reduce fertility in both men and women.
So, now you know some of the harmful effects smoking has on your body and why we’re told not to do it. But the good news… once you stop smoking, your health improves and your body will begin to recover. It’s never too late to give up!
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