New way to double success at quitting smoking....

Today's post: Tuesday, 3-11-2008

Last week, Reuters health news on Yahoo online news had a story that was fascinating.

As our regular readers know, one of the problems of helping people or getting people to quit smoking is that the only thing that most smokers know is that smoking MIGHT give them lung cancer at some future time.

That’s simply too weak to motivate most smokers to quit.

However, the reality of the negative health effects of smoking is far, far worse than that.

Smoking actively causes cardiovascular disease in ALL smokers. And, in fact, it boosts the levels of harmful homocysteine enough to do that AND increase the rate of aging in smokers.

Further, now we know how low your homocysteine level really needs to be for good health, well below 8.9, ideally between 6.0 & 8.0, we can now test smokers & show them that, yes, RIGHT NOW, they are being seriously harmed & FOR SURE. This has none of the maybe it won’t happen to me & if it does it will be years from now that worry about lung cancer does.

As the Reuters story reminded me, there is a second way to show smokers that they are for sure & right now being harmed by their smoking.

It seems that the coaches in my high school were correct. Smoking IS undesirable for athletes as, in their words, “Smoking cuts your wind.” In doctor’s terms, it impairs your lung function. It reduces your capacity to take in air, to breathe it out well, & to get oxygen from it.

The researchers the story reported on also knew that as people get older they tend to be able to breathe in less air volume, their lungs shrink, & their ability to breathe air out quickly diminishes. AND, there are averages for these measures for each age.

What they then did was to get some teenaged smokers & tested their lung function.

They then gave each teen their measured “lung age” – saying in effect, “Because people 45 year old have similar lung functions to yours, we can say your lung age is 45.”

They then observed that more than twice as many of these teenaged smokers quit.

Two things happened to these teens.

1. They had objective evidence based on their own performance in a test that smoking WAS harming them & in fact had already done so FOR SURE.

2. At an age when people over 30 seem to be very old, they discovered that smoking had made their lungs an age, funtionwise, that to them felt VERY old.

And, for many of them, those two things got their attention enough to quit when they otherwise would not have been able to do so.

To repeat, more than twice as many of these teens quit smoking than teenagers who didn't get this information.

So, if you smoke, get your homocysteine level checked. You’ll find it well above the 9.0 level where it produces damage.

And, get the “age” of your lungs as revealed by a lung function test. Unless you exercise regularly & smoke very lightly, just as the teenagers in this study were, you’ll be startled at how “old” this shows your lungs to be.

The good news is that once you quit, you can take the supplements that lower homocysteine & have doing this actually do your health some good without smoking screwing it up. (We’ve done several posts on those supplements.)

And, once you quit, you can build up to doing vigorous interval cardio exercise that will begin to restore your lung capacity.