Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2011; the marketing trends and study findings it describes as recent are from 2011.
Smoking is no longer fashionable. It was once seen as a social habit, a sign of manliness and masculinity in men and a gesture of seduction and elegance in women. Today smoking is a completely antisocial, outdated habit. Although some statistics say young people are starting to smoke earlier, it’s true that more and more young people are swapping the habit for sport, because the symbol of the seducer has changed: it’s no longer a tough gunslinger with a cigarette in his mouth, but a toned, muscular body.
The tobacco industry has had to change both its marketing techniques and its product so that its business doesn’t suffer from the considerable number of people quitting and the loss of potential customers in developed countries. First of all, it’s now betting on emerging countries, where it finds its new consumer victims and where the average age for starting to smoke is 14. On top of that, it has changed the chemical compounds in tobacco to make it far more addictive and stop people from giving up cigarettes. Combined with other causes we’ll mention below, this means that today smoking isn’t Russian roulette, it’s suicide.
According to a study by the CDC (the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), involving more than 60 scientists, the new tobacco reaches the lungs much faster and more aggressively, damaging our DNA immediately. This matches what Dr. Tim McAfee had already warned about in 2010.
More than 7,000 chemicals have been counted in the making of cigarettes, hundreds of which are actively toxic and 75 of which are potentially carcinogenic. It used to be thought that smoking only occasionally reduced the risk of developing a tobacco-related disease. According to this study, there’s no safe level anymore: a single cigarette, about 2 minutes after the smoke enters our lungs, could be enough to damage DNA and lead to diseases that until now nobody could have imagined were linked to tobacco.
Another surprise has been the number of people who have tried to quit smoking and found themselves facing withdrawal similar to that of cocaine.
The argument is that tobacco is now a total destroyer, given that our bodies are exposed not only to the toxicity of the cigarette’s “ingredients” but also to free radicals, the chemicals used to preserve food and the possible electromagnetic pollution society is subjected to.
That’s why our bodies have to fight off too many substances, to the point where they collapse.
“Considering that today’s food lacks the minimum recommended amounts of antioxidants, and that we live with a constant increase in all kinds of pollution, if we also add cigarettes to our lives, whether actively or passively, what’s surprising is that the number of cancer cases among smokers hasn’t soared even more, although we have no doubt it will do so in the next 5 years.
If a smoker used to be considered in the risk zone after 15 years of smoking, that danger line could now be found at 2 years or at 6 months, since not even we scientists know all the chemicals used to make cigarettes.”
In short, what they’re telling us is that any time is a good time to quit smoking and give our bodies a chance to heal the damage done.
Featured image: Ben Schumin from Montgomery Village, Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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