What Happens When You Smoke
It is important to understand what happens when you smoke. Although most know it is unhealthy, not everyone comprehends how damaging it can be.
How Smoking Causes Cough
When people smoke, the substance gets in the eyes, throat and nose. The eyes water, you get a runny nose and the throat becomes irritable. Hairs called the cilia try to clean the gases from your lungs.
The cilia removes all the dirty foreign objects in the lungs. Smoke kills the cilia. The cilia that still live try to remove the smoke. The result is coughing.
When you cough, it means the cilia are trying to clear your throat. What happens when you smoke is the cilia become paralyzed and the coughing ceases. Simply put, when you stop coughing, it means the cilia are unable to clear the lungs of smoke because you keep adding to it by lighting cigarettes.
Tar Gets in the Lungs
70% of the stuff you inhale is kept in the lungs. This stuff becomes tar and kills the cells responsible for cleaning the lungs. This tar also sticks to the throat and lungs, causing respiratory problems. If you smoke a pack a day, you’re putting a cup of tar in your lungs every year.
Cigarettes Affect the Heart
From the throat and lungs, the cigarette chemicals find their way into the bloodstream. Once here, they penetrate the heart and all the other vital organs in the body.
What happens when you smoke a cigarette is it forces the heart to increase by up to 25 beats a minute. Over the day that is an increase of 36,000 beats. This can lead to heart ailments like arrhythmia and irregular heartbeat.
Smoking Reduces Oxygen Supply in the Body
Cigarette smoke produces carbon monoxide which the body mistakes for oxygen. This deprives the cells of oxygen. To make up for this, the heart works double time to supply it. An overworked heart renders it susceptible to heart attacks and other ailments.
Senses of Taste and Smell Reduced
What happens when you smoke is your sense of taste and smell are reduced. This is due to the presence of the tar in the lungs and nasal area. Most smokers notice this when they quit smoking. The tar is the reason why smokers say the food taste different when they stop smoking.
Other Health Problems Caused by Smoking
Cigarettes and tobacco do more than just cause lung cancer; they are also responsible for weakening the body and making it vulnerable to other types of cancer.
Smoking by pregnant women leads to premature birth. In some cases it results in low birth weight too. The carbon monoxide in the body affects the functions of the brain and other important body tissues.
To sum it up, what happens when you smoke is you kill yourself slowly. Not only that, but the people around you get sick too.
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