Smoking and Your Body

By giving you the facts about what smoking means to your body we hope you'll make an informed decision about lighting up.

• Tobacco smoke is made up mainly of tar (which builds up in your lungs), nicotine and carbon monoxide. It also contains other poisonous substances like cyanide, formaldehyde and ammonia.
• Smokeless tobacco (chewing tobacco, snuff) is also very dangerous to our health. Smokeless tobacco users are more likely to develop cancer of the mouth, lip, tongue, gums, and throat. You are also more likely to develop dental problems such as cavities, tooth loss and gum disease.
• The nicotine in tobacco is one of the most addictive substances known. About eight out of every ten people who try smoking get hooked.
• Tobacco use causes many different kinds of cancer -- and not just lung cancer. Think mouth, throat, pancreas, bladder, kidney and cervix. Then there's respiratory and heart disease.
• Young women who smoke and are taking birth control pills increase their chances for serious heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure.
• Second-hand smoke can cause lung cancer among non-smokers.
• A Canadian dies every 12 minutes of a tobacco related disease.

In 1996, tobacco smoke killed over 45,000 people in Canada. That's more than the total of all murders, alcohol-related deaths, car accidents and suicides. (It's estimated that in 2002, 37,000 Canadians died from tobacco smoke).

It will never happen to me. Yeah, right. When we're young and strong, it's easy to think that cancer and heart disease can only happen to other people - much older people. You're immune, right? Wrong. Here are some sobering facts.

• Among young people, the short-term health consequences of smoking include respiratory effects - cough and increased frequency and severity of illnesses like asthma, chest colds and bronchitis - as well as addiction to nicotine.
• In adults, cigarette smoking causes heart disease and stroke. Early signs of these diseases can be found in adolescents who smoke.
• The younger people start smoking, the more likely they are to become strongly addicted to nicotine.
• Most young people who smoke regularly continue to smoke throughout adulthood.
• Smoking reduces the rate of lung growth and it can hamper the level of maximum lung function and capacity.
• According to the US Center for Disease Control, high school seniors who are regular smokers and began smoking by grade nine are more than twice as likely than their non-smoking peers to report poorer overall health, cough with phlegm or blood, shortness of breath when not exercising, and wheezing or gasping.
• Smoking hurts young people's physical fitness in terms of both performance and endurance -- even among young people trained in competitive running.
• The resting heart rates of young adult smokers are two to three beats per minute faster than non-smokers.
• Smoking at an early age increases the risk of lung cancer.

You've heard it all before. Smoking causes cancer and makes your fingers yellow. Kissing a smoker is like kissing an ashtray.

Sure. We know you hear this every day. But let's face the facts -- too many young Canadians are still tempted even though the vast majority don't smoke. Cancer statistics and heavy messages just don't seem to stick. So what gives?