Smoking is even more dangerous for younger people…..

Today's post: Thursday, 1-10-2008

On Monday night I went to a lecture on preventing heart disease looking for something new that I might use myself & share with you.

The lecturer was Randall Stafford, MD from the Stanford Prevention Research Center & Preventive Cardiology Clinic. This Stanford center has tracked the developments in preventing heart & cardiovascular disease for many years.

Dr Stafford said that one of the worst causes of heart disease to avoid is smoking & breathing second hand smoke.

Most of the causes tend to catch up with people over 65 years old as even though they are harmful they take quite some time to do enough damage to kill you off with a fatal heart attack or stroke.

Smoking is different. Smoking causes heart disease so much faster, it often kills off people in their 40’s & 50’s.

Unfortunately for smokers, all of them are having their cardiovascular system harmed every time they smoke. And, hardly any of them know it.

The big & well known publicity about the danger of smoking was that it makes getting lung cancer a lot more likely. (It also doubles the risk of getting any cancer.)

But many smokers don’t get cancer. And the younger ones tend to not know any fellow smokers who did or who have.

So they just think they’ll continue to be one of the lucky people who don’t get cancer & keep smoking.

The very bad news is that cancer is the LITTLE risk from smoking.

EVERYONE who smokes is giving himself or herself a heart disease causing treatment every time they light up.

Here’s an excerpt from an upcoming eBook on reducing high blood pressure without drugs. It has one of the main reasons smoking produces heart disease; how to get a test to see that it’s already happening to you right now; & tips on how to quit smoking.:

“Avoid cigarette smoke.

If you are like me & most other people who are working to get your blood pressure into the ideal range when it’s been too high, you want to get that done; you want it to STAY done; & you want the health protection that gives you.

And, you don’t want to hurt your health or die while you are working on it.

Cigarette smoke (& cigar & pipe smoke) do the reverse of each of these things.

That’s true whether it’s second hand smoke or you smoke yourself and inhale it directly.

Even worse, not only do you die at a younger age, by over 20 years in many cases, the side effects & horrible impact on your quality of life of tobacco smoke make those of the worst blood pressure drugs look mild by comparison. These include erectile dysfunction, heart attacks, strokes, premature aging, emphysema, and pain while walking and foot amputation from PAD, peripheral artery disease. And, what’s NOT widely known is these things happen to virtually ALL smokers to some degree

The lung cancers & other cancers many smokers get that they would have escaped as nonsmokers are just the extras. But they can also ruin your quality of life & kill you just fine.

When you first inhale tobacco smoke, within a few seconds or a couple of minutes, your blood pressure goes up quite a bit. This IS temporary. But if you are still at a reading of something like 145 over 95 & this surge from smoking of something like 24 over 17 could easily put you at 169 over 112. And, that’s high enough to cause you damage before the effect wears off.

Smoking also causes a near immediate increase in Carbon Monoxide in the blood of smokers when they smoke. And enough of it remains hours later to such an extent that you can do a simple fingertip test & tell if someone smokes or is exposed to a lot of secondhand smoke. This means the cells of smokers are usually partially starved for adequate oxygen.

But the most harmful effect of smoking is that it is a direct & multiple cause of damage to your heart, lungs, & blood vessels.

SOME smokers get cancer. (The cancers many smokers get are just an extra, horribly bad, side effect.)

Unfortunately, most smokers are totally unaware of the main harmful effect that ALL smokers get & only know that some smokers get cancer & think they won’t be one of the unlucky ones.

But ALL smokers get their heart, lungs, & blood vessels damaged. This damage increases plaque build up in your arteries so they are thinner & resist the flow of blood. And, the more this happens & the longer it goes on, the higher your diastolic & overall blood pressure will be. Even worse, this process stiffens your blood vessels & prevents them from relaxing or responding when you need for them to during sex or exercise or emergencies and to relax afterwards.

Smoke increases your homocysteine levels which damages the inside of your arteries which your body tries to repair with glue-like LDL cholesterol which causes this plaque build up. And, smoke reduces your levels of the HDL cholesterol that cleans up excess LDL cholesterol in your blood vessels; & smoke even keeps the HDL you have left over from working very well. In addition, particulate air pollution tends to trigger heart attacks & strokes and other health problems. In rooms where people smoke the particulate air pollution is extremely high.

The effect on your arteries is like a city street where everyone throws their garbage in the street; most of the garbage men have been fired or laid off; & the ones still on the job have the flu. Imagine how easy it would be to drive down a street like that. This is one of the reasons people with high blood pressure tend to get worse over time. And, smoking puts all the causes of that problem on steroids. That makes them worse & happen more & happen faster.

Many smokers who learn this information simply quit cold turkey & never start up again.

Unfortunately, many other smokers find they are more strongly addicted & have trouble not starting up again.

The good news is that doctors now have an extremely effective drug to help smokers quit, called Varenicline with the trade name Chantix, that basically turns off the addiction while smokers quit & get used to not smoking. I’ve even read that smokers who take it LOSE weight instead of gaining it.

This drug works significantly better than Buprion or Wellbutrin, also known as Zyban, & MUCH better than placebo or taking no pill at all.

According to the www.chantix.com website full prescribing information section, about seventy percent of people taking the higher & slightly more effective recommended dose have no problem with it. The rest have some degree of nausea. If that’s bad enough to be troubling, the site recommends having your doctor cut you back to a dose of half that much which is about seventy-five to ninety percent as effective.

However, taking a capsule of ginger before the meal you are recommended to take the Chantix after may also work. It has been proven to sharply increase how much it takes to make you feel nausea. A supplement company called New Chapter makes a supplement they call GingerForce that would be ideal for this.

My guess is that this will solve the problem for many, possibly most, people. And cutting the dose in half PLUS taking the ginger will work for many of the rest of the people.

The other thing to remember about this drug is that taking it is temporary. The more the nicotine is cleared from your system, the more the addiction to it is cleared from your brain physiology, the more you come to look on quitting smoking as an escape from a horrible & deadly trap, the more fully you understand why & how powerfully true that is, & the more you find to relieve stress, socialize, boost your energy level quickly, enjoy life, & feel better, the sooner you can stop taking it safely if you do get side-effects.”