The Lesser-Known Side-Effects of Smoking

Let’s face it: we all know smoking is bad for us. And most of us know that it can cause lung cancer, smoker’s cough, and all-around bad breath. But there are some other not-so-pretty side-effects of smoking that you might not have known, including getting wrinkles, increasing healing time and risk of illness, causing fires, going blind, causing impotence, and dulling your tastebuds.

Smoking Gives you Bad Skin and Wrinkles
Because smoking restricts blood vessels, it can prevent oxygen and nutrients like Vitamin A from getting to the skin. Smoking also affects the body’s production of collagen and elastin — fibers that give your skin its strength and elasticity. As a result, skin begins to sag and wrinkle prematurely. Lines tend to develop around the mouth from sucking on cigarettes, and around the eyes from squinting through smoke.

Smoking Increases Your Risk of Injury and Slows Healing Time
Your skin is not the only tissue that is composed of collagen: this fiber is also present in your tendons and ligaments. Therefore if your body’s ability to produce collagen is hampered, injuries involving damage to tendons and ligaments will heal more slowly. These types of injuries are common, especially for those people involved in sports.

Smokers' broken bones also take a lot longer to heal. Nicotine, a main ingredient in cigarettes, constricts blood vessels around 25% of their normal diameter. Since the new formation of bone depends on a adequate supply of blood, oxygen, and nutrients reaching the injured area, bones tend to heal more slowly in smokers because lower levels of nutrients are supplied to the bones.

Smoking Increases Your Risk of Illness
Studies show that smokers get more colds, flu, bronchitis, and pneumonia than non-smokers. In addition, people with certain health conditions like asthma, become more sick if they smoke (and often if they're just around people who smoke). Because teens who smoke as a way to manage weight often light up instead of eating, their bodies lack the nutrients they need to grow, develop, and fight off illness properly.

The mixture of nicotine and carbon monoxide in each cigarette you smoke temporarily increases your heart rate and blood pressure, straining your heart and blood vessels.
This can cause heart attacks and stroke. Not surprisingly, heart disease and strokes are more common among smokers than non-smokers.

Smoking Causes Age-Related Blindness
British studies have recently shown that smoking increases the chances of going blind as you get older. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) results in severe and irreversible loss of central vision, especially in people over the age of 60. Experts warn that smokers are twice as likely as non-smokers to lose their sight in later life. Some of these experts further argue that the link between AMD and smoking is now as strong as the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Smoking Could Burn Down Your House
Smoking is the cause of many house fires, some of which cost human lives. According to a worldwide study published by the University of California Davis in 1998, smoking is a leading cause of house fires and fire-related deaths. In particular, smoking in bed is a major cause of accidental fire deaths in homes because people fall asleep with burning cigarettes on their beds.

Smoking Can Cause Impotence
Guys, take note: smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by around 50% for men in their 30s and 40s. Most of us know that eating fatty foods can increase cholesterol and fatty deposits inside our arteries, but less people are aware that smoking also increases these fatty deposits. And a long-term build-up of fatty deposits in the arteries that carry blood to the penis can decrease the flow of blood into that area.

Smoking Dulls Your Tastebuds
Chemicals and tar from cigarettes coat the inside of a smoker's mouth, including their tastebuds, which leads some smokers to over-season their food. The chemicals and tar in cigarettes also hamper the functioning of the cells of the taste buds and nose "buds". And since our sense of taste depends largely on whether or not we can smell what we’re eating, “dulled” olfactory cells will lead to dulled taste.

For tips on quitting smoking, visit the Canadian Cancer Society at www.cancer.ca, or the American Cancer Society at www.cancer.org.