Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya
Har fikr ko dhooyen mein udhata chala gaya
The second line means "every tension I went on puffing away in a smoke". This and a recent post on Gurveen's blog made me come up with a question.
What are the ingredients of a cigarette?
It turns out a cigarette contains 599 additive and just over 4000 chemical compounds are created when it is burnt!
Quitsmokinghub.com has listed some of these harmful chemicals and their ill effects. Arsenic, benzene, chromium, nickel, vinyl chloride, aminobiphenyl, 2-naphthylamine, cadmium, N-nitrosodiethylamine, N-nitrosopyrrolidine, N-nitrosodiethanolamine are the ingredients that can lead to cancer. Breathing ammonia can cause asthma. Acrolein, pyridine, nickel, cadmium and catechol are reponsible for respiratory diseases. The nicotine, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and toluene that are present can cause dizziness, nausea and headaches.
It is nicotine which makes the cigarette addictive. Did you know that it is ranked above alcohol, cocaine and heroin as the drug with the highest severity of dependence? Nicotine travels all the way to the brain via the lungs and blood stream. The brain is the actual site of addiction!! For those who smoke I wonder if they know that when they breathe in nicotine they are actually taking in a commercial pesticide!!
Americanheart.org says that "Nicotine causes a short-term increase in blood pressure, heart rate and the flow of blood from the heart. It also causes the arteries to narrow. The smoke includes carbon monoxide, which reduces the amount of oxygen the blood can carry. This, combined with the nicotine effects, creates an imbalance between the demand for oxygen by the cells and the amount of oxygen the blood can supply."
Everyone who has seen Julia Robert's famous movie Erin Brockovich will remember the discussion she has with a college professor about hexavalent chromium. Chromium six which finds its way into the human body through cigarette smoke is responsible for causing cancer, respiratory diseases and irritation to the skin and eye.
Cocoa used in chocolates is harmless. But it is used in cigarettes to open up the lung more to the tobacco smoke. Another additive is ammonia which I'd like to remind the readers which in everyday life is used in solid and liquid fertilizers. One of the famous application of arsenic is as a rat poison. On normal occasions formaldehyde is used to embalm dead bodies, butane as jet fuel and carbon monoxide is an exhaust gas coming out of cars!! I clearly remember using liquid chromium during chemistry practicals in college to clean all the dirty testubes and beakers.
These are only some of the harmful chemicals. These and the rest of 570 additives can be viewed at http://quitsmoking.about.com/cs/nicotineinhaler/a/cigingredients.htm.
Let me leave you now with a picture comparing a normal lung with a smoker's lung.
And here is a picture of the what other organs that are affected by smoking:
PS: Hope all this puts off some people's addiction to smoking.
2 comments:
haha lovely gruesome pics of those lungs:D
ya i guess eventually it is addiction..dunno y dey even start smokin..probably coz of the cool factor(which i have never understood)
i know of dis uncle who has high sugar and used to drink and smoke a lot..his condition became so bad he had to stop driving in case he lost consciousness while driving..
now hes better..hes given up drinking..but hasnt been able to giv up smoking yet..tho he is tryin very hard and really needs to giv it up for his health..sad to see that happen to people..
some people have this funda that everything should be tried once. they don't realise that is that sometimes it can be simply one sutta that can get you addicted. and once they addicted they find it hard to stop specially when the ill effects of smoking kill softly with time. eventually they need a shock to bring them out of the "haze". :)
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