This is not the first time I emphasize on the fact that smoking is bad for you. Everybody knows that. Everybody also knows that hamburgers - fast food - have a very negative impact on one’s heath. Eating food with too much salt in it, or with too much fat. Crossing the street without carefully looking. Drinking too much alcohol. Doing drugs. Walking around naked on a -5 degrees weather. Insulting a police officer. Dancing on a cliff. Trying to commit suicide is also bad for your health! But I want to have the freedom of doing all that.
The point is we all should be free to express ourselves as we wish to, as long as we don’t interfere with others right to do so. We all must weight the benefits and the risks involved in all that we endeavor. Society must not ban but educate. We should all have access to unbiased information. A society that is constantly struggling to remove all the risks is doomed to take away all the individual liberty and ultimately doom itself. The purpose never excuses the means.
A cigarette will NOT kill you. A pack of cigarettes you use to smoke during a week will most definitely NOT make your health any worse than it is. You will NOT live longer just because you never had a cigarette in your entire life. That is all bullshit!
The media and most of the medical literature on smoking have been telling us lately that smoking causes lung cancer. That is, repeat after me, BULLSHIT. There is no proof of that and no matter what they want us to believe, people don’t live by statistics. If you believe them, also believe this: in the near future YOU are going to die in a car accident. ‘Cause there are sooo many car accidents these days. Does that make any sense to you?! Are you so scared that you’re not going to get out of your house anymore? Oh, then be warned: planes are crashing these days, meteors fall all the time, explosions everywhere. Damn!
There are no studies in this world that can show a correlation between a casual smoker (less than a pack a week) and lung cancer. Lung cancer is not even in the top 5 causes of death. All cancers combined account for 15% of all annual deaths and lung cancer only for 2%. Occasional cigarette has NEVER proven to be a risk factor in lung cancer.
Second hand smoking cannot be shown to be a factor that causes lung cancer. There are a lot of types of pollution that people are exposed to each day that are a lot more dangerous compared to second hand smoking. Strictly statistically speaking, passive smokers are not more exposed to lung cancer than regular non-smokers. There are no studies that can claim that second hand smoke exposure during childhood increases their risk of getting lung cancer.
The researchers have been trying to make the mice sick of lung cancer by exposing them to cigarette smoke for years and years. THEY FAILED!
Yes, SMOKING DOES NOT CAUSE LUNG CANCER and it never will. That’s the truth. Smoking is just one of the many risk factors for lung cancer. What smoking does is increase the risk. But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer compared to a regular non-smoker is much lower than one might suspect. Based upon what you can read on a pack of cigarettes these days, you must think that if you smoke you will surely have lung cancer or, at least, you’re very very likely to.
What would you say if those risks were below .1? That’s below 10 percent!? If you don’t believe me, correlate the statistics for lung cancer deaths, smoker / non-smoker yourself. You’ll find that a smoker has a less than 10% LIFETIME chance of dying from cancer whereas the non-smoker has a 1% chance. Yeah, wouldn’t you know, you’ve got a chance in a hundred to die of lung cancer even you’re not smoking, not being even a passive smoker. I always figured that if I smoked, I’d be like 40-50 times more in danger of dying from lung cancer.
The smoker does indeed have a risk 8x times higher than a non-smoker to get lung cancer. But that’s by no means a certainty. SMOKING DOES NOT CAUSE LUNG CANCER just like NOT SMOKING DOES NOT PREVENT IT! You don’t see this info in the media, what you do see is “if you smoke you die”, when the fact is lung cancer accounts for only 2% of the annual deaths world wide.
Smoking alone is not enough to develop cancer. Any type of cancer. No doctor or scientist in the world could argue with that fact. Cancer needs a series of factors to exist and combine together in order for it to appear. Those factors include cellular disorder, DNA alteration, genetics, immune system disorder, vitamin deficiency, pollution and many more. Even the plain old being lazy is an important factor. The dose and duration of the factors involved is very important. Cancer appears when most of these factors combine to have a synergistic effect. NONE of these alone, independently, can ever be responsible for causing cancer.
Smoking does not cause any type of cancer. Smoking increases your risks to get cancer. Those risks are less than 10 times higher than those that a regular non-smoker has.
Quit smoking for a number of good reasons. Read through the posts on this website to find plenty. Don’t do it because you’re afraid of having cancer someday. You might as well have cancer because of a lot of reasons you cannot fight against, like genetics. If you like to smoke, want to smoke, can’t stop smoking, go ahead… SMOKE! But don’t smoke excessively. THAT will kill you. Most definitely.
