Stop Smoking and Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease
While the media has long promoted the link between smoking and lung cancer, numerous other diseases are prevalent among smokers. Heart disease is just one of the terrifying possibilities. More than 440,000 people die from smoking-related diseases every year in the US
Smoking is able to influence your chances of developing heart disease all by itself. However, when added to the sedentary lifestyle most Americans have, the results can be catastrophic. Cigarette smoke has been shown to increase blood pressure, as well as increasing the clotting within your blood. This leads to numerous problems throughout the entire body, but especially for the heart. Smoking also decreases the body's tolerance for exercise, making you winded far sooner than a nonsmoker. This helps increase any sedentary habits. If you stop smoking
In addition, women using oral birth control pills are at incredible risks of developing high blood pressure (hypertension), heart attack, heart disease and stroke from cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke has also been shown to decrease the amount of good cholesterol in your body, helping bad cholesterol to build up on the walls of your arteries, increasing blood pressure and the chance of heart attack.
Even second hand smoke can greatly increase the chance of developing heart disease in those around you. Thus, that pleasurable habit may be killing the ones you love. It seems a very high price to pay for the pleasure of a single cigarette. Even pipes and cigars seem to damage the body, though cigarettes are the deadliest. While lung cancer may lead to a drawn out, painful death, dying by inches, as it were, heart disease can be just as terrible.
If you stop smoking today, you can avoid a hideous fate. Heart disease, peripheral artery disease, hypertension and other related disorders can cause you to be short tempered, reduce your enjoyment of life, even limit your mobility, keeping you bound to your home. Heart disease is a slow, wasting process, just like lung cancer, but the signs can be less obvious – though no less horrifying.