Smoking hurts your BRAIN & Exercise Doubles Quitting Success...

Today's post: Tuesday, 6-10-2008

Smoking harms your brain too.

As we’ve posted here before, some people who smoke get cancer; but everyone who smokes loses breathing capacity enough to measure & begins to get heart & cardiovascular disease & lose good circulation of their blood.

In addition, many people who smoke don’t do regular exercise either.

So, it would seem likely that with less oxygen, less blood flow, & less new brain cells from the effects of exercise smokers gradually would be prone to some mental decline as they continue to smoke.

It seems that has recently been verified as happening !!

Here are the key facts from yesterday’s news story on this.:

“Smoking hurts mind as well as body: study

Mon Jun 9, 2008 4:12 PM ET CHICAGO (Reuters) –

Middle-aged adults who smoke tended to perform poorly on tests of memory and reasoning compared to nonsmokers, adding to the list of reasons not to smoke, French researchers said on Monday.

Analyzing previously collected data on about 5,000 British civil servants, the researchers found those who smoked were more likely than people who never smoked to be in the lowest-performing of five groups in tests of memory, reasoning, vocabulary and verbal fluency.

Smoking was associated with mental decline in middle age, as it is with dementia and a host of physical ills later in life, they found.

"Smoking in middle age is associated with memory deficit and decline in reasoning abilities," concluded Severine Sabia and colleagues from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Villejuif, France.”

The authors point out that people who quit smoking also tend to do better on other things that produce good health including eating right & exercising.

They also pointed out that it was harder to test the smokers after several years had passed as many of them had died & many of the remaining ones declined to participate the second time.

These facts have two implications.

For most jobs, employers will get employees more likely to think well, stay alive, & be cooperative if they only hire nonsmokers.

And, if you smoke, you are much more likely to keep your thinking abilities intact & more likely to get hired for jobs when you need them if you quit smoking.

That’s in addition to cutting your risk of cancer somewhat, & dramatically slashing your risk of heart attacks, strokes, erectile dysfunction, & peripheral artery disease AND of dying early.

In a separate online health article I read in the last week or so, was that:

People who do or begin doing regular exercise when they try to quit smoking had DOUBLE the success rate of the people who didn’t exercise.

In addition, those who gained weight after quitting & exercised only gained half as much as the people who gained weight and did NOT exercise.

This dramatic effect on quitting success is NOT at all well known.

But it clearly has these two causes I think.

1. The people who have the strongest motivation to take charge of their health and proactively stay healthy are those who are most likely to also exercise & the most likely to quit smoking.

So the people who do exercise AND try to quit smoking start out as more motivated.

2. People often smoke or keep smoking because it has some anti-depressant and some stress relieving components. Some even smoke as they get temporary improvement in mental concentration.

Exercise has each of those 3 effects. Many studies show it relieves depression, often as well or better than anti-depressant drugs. Exercise & the related deep breathing while exercising work to relieve stress. And, people who exercise DO think & concentrate better.

So the people who do exercise AND try to quit are getting a good bit of what smoking used to do for them WITHOUT needing to get these things from smoking.

So it’s then EASIER to quit smoking for the people who try to quit AND exercise.

And, I think the reason that the improvement in the success rate is so large, is because BOTH of these causes help produce it.

So, if you are trying to quit, here are 3 things to use.:

1. Realize it protects your memory & ability to think to quit -- in addition to everything else quitting does for you.

2. Begin thinking of yourself as someone who is proactively taking steps to protect & keep your good health.

3. And, be SURE to include regular exercise as part of your quitting effort.

(Even a few 10 minute walks each week or a few pushups when you get stressed will help. Just keep doing it.)

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.