Cigarettes Contain Radioactive Polonium

Cigarettes are known to cause cancer...

But we now know there's another reason why... they contain radioactive material, specifically polonium-210!

Tobacco companies also have known about it since 1959. As reported in ABC, historical documents reveal tobacco companies not only knew about the radioactive substance, but studied it, then refused to do anything about it!

They figured out that:

1) It caused "cancerous growths" in the lungs of smokers,
2) Calculated how much radiation a regular smoker would ingest over 20 years

Then they kept the research secret. The level of deception is breath-taking.

The radiation alone from cigarettes can account for up to 138 deaths for every 1,000 smokers over period of 25 years.

Even more disturbing, is that ALL tobacco products on the market today still contain radioactive polonium. This is in spite of washing techniques available since 1980 to remove the radioactivity but refused by tobacco companies to perform whether due to cost or the fact that washing would remove the addictive nicotine component as well.

Take home message?

STOP smoking! It's killing you through not only harmful chemicals, but also radioactivity!

Read the ABC article here.

Reference:
Cigarette Smoke Radioactivity and Lung Cancer Risk. Nicotine Tob Res (2011) doi: 10.1093/ntr/ntr145

Smoking is Highly Addictive in Kids (Teens and Babies) [video]

All it takes is one cigarette a month.

A recent study in Pediatrics that tracked the course of addiction to smoking among a group of sixth-graders found that smoking only one cigarette a month was all it took to become dependent.

In the study titled "Early Course of Nicotine Dependence in Adolescent Smokers," the researchers found that one cigarette a month or one cigarette a week was enough to keep addiction satisfied, but as time goes by, the child has to smoke cigarettes more and more frequently. So people may be addicted for more than a year before they feel the need to smoke a cigarette every day.

Read a NPR story on this research here.

Apparently, this may be true not only for tweens, but even infants... Here is a YouTube video of a 2 year old baby who has become addicted and is now a chain-smoker.

Another Reason to Stop Smoking... Decreased Sense of Taste

Greek researchers published a study in which they described a significant decrease in taste ability in smokers compared to non-smokers. In the study titled "Evaluation of young smokers and non-smokers with electrogustometry and contact endoscopy," 62 male Greek soldiers were evaluated for smoking and taste by using two different instruments called electrogustometry (measures taste thresholds) and contact endoscopy (wich evaluated the morphology and density of papillae on the tongue's tip).

This study could explain why smokers not only complain of decreased sense of taste, but also change in the way things taste (dysgeusia).

Click here to read the study abstract.