Don’t Smoke Your Life Away!

Diksha Chhabra
Zyla Health
Published in
7 min readMay 26, 2018

--

Let’s take a trip inside your body to see what happens when cigarette smoke travels through your body organs!

Let’s start:

The urban Indian lifestyle has its own perils. We get so engrossed in our day to-day work deadlines, family commitments and city traffic, that we hardly get a breather to think about how our body is doing. After all, our very existence is our body and our mind. But overtime, our mind ignores the existence of our body. This ignorance can be fatal, as one fine day our body might get tired of the lack of attention and give up on us. Good news is if your body hasn’t given up already, it’s giving you another chance. Symptoms are nothing but your body talking to you asking for attention. It’s time to listen to what your body is telling you. It’s time to be “mind”ful of your body. And the most amazing thing about your body is that it can heal quickly even with little attention from you. The technologies today, however advanced they may be, do not provide us with a clear picture of the insides of our body. The day is not far when imaging technologies will make this possible. Until then, we will use imagination and imagery to help you take a trip inside your body to really understand what’s going on. We will travel from organ to organ and reveal scientific findings co-relating them with your current health problems or symptoms. Remember, understanding your body’s physiology is the key ingredient of healing. As you go further, immerse yourself in the reading and picture yourself viewing your body organs and you will be enlightened by what you learn.

You start your day with smoking:

To you, it might just be another cigarette, but to your body, it’s a serious crisis that requires all systems to be put on red alert. Imagine a series of wildfiresn hitting a small peaceful town every single day, never giving the citizens enough time to heal and rebuild. This is comparable to that what your body is experiencing each time you inhale a cigarette smoke.

The smoke enters your Mouth

You notice that the heat and tar from cigarettes has caused your lips to darken. The constant pouting and sucking that you do in order to take a puff has also led to ‘smoker’s pout’ (fine lines around the lips when you pout).

One of the key components of cigarette smoke is tar — a black, sticky,
resinous substance that’s highly toxic and carcinogenic (cancer causing). The first thing tar does after entering your mouth is coat your teeth and gums. It damages your teeth’s enamel, discoloring them and making them more sensitive.

As you peek inside your mouth, you notice that your gums are coated in tar. Over time, this has blackened them and made them recede.

The heat and carcinogenic chemicals in the smoke have damaged the cells in your mouth, making them more prone to mutations such as oral cancer. A portion of the smoke travels to your nasal cavity, where it irritates the tissues and coats them with tar. This leads to a loss of the sense of smell.

If you’re a pack-a-day smoker who picked up the habit when you were 18, you’re likely to lose 4 to 5 teeth by the time you’re 35.

Smoke enters your Throat, Trachea and Esophagus

Cigarette smoke irritates and damages the lining of the throat. This can cause the smoker’s voice to become hoarse, making speaking more difficult. Over time, it can lead to throat cancer.

You notice that your voice has become hoarse over the last few years and you acknowledge the effect of smoking.

Smoke also destroys the mucosal cells that line the back of your throat. This can cause frequent infections, dryness and painful irritation of the throat.
The human trachea (wind pipe) is coated in cilia — microscopic hair-like substances that sweep foreign particles away.

You notice that tobacco smoke has paralyzed and eventually destroyed cilia in your wind pipe, and led to ‘smokers cough’ as the remaining cilia struggle to clear out massive amounts of tar.

Tobacco smoke also damages the muscles in your esophagus (food pipe)
that are essential in preventing the acids in your stomach from rising
back up into your throat. This is why smokers have an increased risk of
developing acid reflux.

Smoke enters your lungs

The smoke enters deep inside the lungs, and damages the floating scavenger cells that work to remove foreign particles from the lungs’ tiny air sacs, called alveoli. A lot of what you inhale turns to tar. This tar isn’t unlike what you might use to pave a road or shingle a house. Only about 30% of cigarette tar is sent back into the air through exhalation — the rest sticks to your throat and lungs. Besides being disgusting, tar kills healthy lung cells. A pack-a-day smoker ingests a full cup of tar into his or her lungs every year.

Smoke enters your Heart and Blood Vessels

From the lungs, the chemicals in cigarette smoke are pretty much immediately absorbed into your bloodstream. From here they go straight to your heart and from there, everywhere else in your body. Your heart begins to beat faster as soon as you light up, as much as 10 to 25 beats per minute. That adds up to 36,000 extra beats per day. Smoke can also cause an irregular heartbeat, or arrhythmia. The oxygen level in your blood is reduced because the carbon monoxide produced when you smoke tricks the body into thinking that it’s oxygen (Red blood cell has more capacity to make a bond with carbon monoxide than oxygen). Problem is, your body’s cells still need oxygen, so your heart goes into overtime to supply it. Smoking increases the cholesterol and unhealthy fats circulating in the blood, leading to unhealthy fatty deposits. Each time a person smokes a cigarette, the blood vessels become sticky from the chemicals in the tobacco smoke and this leads to fat sticking to the artery walls.

You notice that over time, cholesterol, fats, and other debris has built up not only in your blood but also the walls of your arteries.

Another thing that happens when you smoke is that your blood pressure rises by about 10 to 15%. This buildup narrows the arteries and blocks normal blood flow to the heart, brain, and legs. Blocked blood flow to the heart or brain can cause a heart attack or stroke.

You notice that the chemicals in cigarette smoke have elevated your blood pressure.
This combined with the lowered oxygen intake from the smoker’s lungs gravely increases the risk of heart attack, as the heart tries to work overtime on insufficient amounts of fuel.

Smoke enters your Brain

Nicotine from cigarettes is as addictive as heroin. Nicotine addiction is hard to beat because it changes your brain. The brain develops extra nicotine receptors to accommodate the large doses of nicotine from tobacco.

You notice that when you lower the nicotine that your brain is getting, you face nicotine withdrawal. You feel anxious, irritable, and have strong cravings for nicotine.

Although smoking and alcohol have long-term adverse effects; cessation reverses these effects, which is detectable within one month of quitting — The World Journal of Gastroenterology

Your health starts to improve the second you stub out your last cigarette

It’s never too late and you are already making a great start! As soon as you stop smoking, your body goes into fix-it mode. Your cilia wake up and start sweeping again. Oxygen is again delivered in full supply to your heart and the rest of your body. As soon you quit over-drinking (alcohol)
your liver goes in fix-it mode and gets rid of the extra iron. The days turn into weeks and months and eventually years and before you know it, you may feel like you never were addicted to these devils. You may think why should one care when one is not immortal and bound to die. Good health is about being able to fully enjoy the time we do have. It is about being as functional as possible throughout our entire lives and avoiding crippling, painful and lengthy battles with disease.There are many better ways to die, and to live.

“The nicotine was making me dead, inside and out. Now I feel free, vibrant, energetic, focused, and so alive!”- Smoke-free individual

Quitting smoking and alcohol, Knowing and practicing good nutrition,
30 minutes of exercise everyday and stress management can reverse
most of the problems you just noticed inside your body. So gear up for
the change. And tell yourself — “I am ready for this!”

Manage your health and reduce chances of development of health related complications. Download Zyla app (http://bit.ly/2BftxyE-defeatingdiabetes) for continuous monitoring and personalised care.

Connect with us:

  1. Subscribe to our Youtube channel: https://bit.ly/2o19OzE to watch videos on health and health-related conditions.
  2. Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zylahealth
  3. Join our facebook community, “Defeating Diabetes” and get daily updates: https://bit.ly/2nloObl
  4. Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zylahealth/
  5. Visit our website: https://www.zyla.in/
  6. Talk to us on WhatsApp — https://goo.gl/kjofPU

References: The above blog includes insights and hand-picked excerpts from AHA, NIH, Textbook of Pathology — Harsh Mohan, Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology, quiday.org, WebMD, samokefree.gov, dailymail.co.uk, vapingdaily.com

--

--

A clinical researcher leveraging the power of science to change the world.