How Bad Is Smoking For Health?
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Jonathan Foulds, MA, MAppSci, PhD
Almost 20 years ago when I started my first job in tobacco research, I told my new boss that I’d like to get a sense of whether smoking really was so bad for health. I asked him if he could give me something to read to help me understand the health effects. Professor Michael Russell – one of the world’s top researchers into tobacco addiction – was clearly a bit irritated by my question, and proceeded to dump four U.S. Surgeon General’s Reports and two Royal College of Physicians reports on my desk. Each one had about three hundred pages. He said, “If that’s not enough for you I have more in my office”. Since that time many more volumes have been published demonstrating the many ways in which smoking is harmful to health. I can’t pretend to have read all of them. After a while the sheer weight of the evidence becomes so convincing, one doesn’t need any more. The more important task is to communicate it to the public. The simplest way to put it is that if you smoke and keep smoking there’s a 50-50 chance it will kill you. However, I prefer to compare it to the game of drawing straws. A smoker who continues smoking is forced to take a chance like drawing one of 4 straws. Two are long straws, meaning they won’t lose any years of life due to their smoking (one because they were unfortunately destined to die young of other causes, and the other because they were fortunate to have a genetic makeup and other factors making them less prone to lethal smoking-caused diseases). One is a medium length straw, meaning they will lose 10 years of life due to smoking, and the other is a short straw, meaning they will lose 30 years of life due to smoking. Of course no-one knows what straw they are going to get until its too late. If you had to estimate the average risk (30 years, plus 10 years, divided by 4) it is that a smoker will lose 10 years of life as compared with never smoking (but with a 25% chance of dieing so young they never get to see their grandkids grow up).
Some people say they don’t want to live into their 80s anyway. It is important for smokers to know that those years of life lost due to smoking are healthy years, not sick years. Smokers have fewer years in health (free from disability) but also more years in sickness/disability. For every person who is killed by smoking each year in the US (over 400,000 per year) there are 20 still alive who suffer a serious smoking-caused illness that year (ranging from a chest infection to a non-fatal heart attack).
One other simplified way to think about it is that each cigarette takes about 11 minutes off your life. As it takes about that long to smoke the cigarette, it means that every minute spent smoking shortens your lifespan by approximately that same amount of time.
There is no other single behavior that has such a massive impact on one's health, and this is the reason I chose to focus my career on smoking cessation. Psychologists don’t frequently have the opportunity to save a life. I figure that every person I can help to quit smoking gains about 10 healthy years of life, and that’s not bad for a days work! These massive effects of smoking on health are the main reason most smokers want to quit. In future posts I’ll discuss the ways you can increase your chances of successfully quitting. Talk to you soon.
Jonathan
p.s. If you want more information on smoking and health, I recommend this site:
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/sgr_2004/sgranimation/flash/index.html
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11 Comments:
At Wed Feb 21, 07:40:00 AM 2007,
Anonymous said…
Granted smoking is bad...but I would like to know what cigarettes you've been smoking that take 11 minutes o smoke. I've (foolishly) been smoking half my life and it takes no more than 5 minutes if I barely draw. Usually it's like 3. This is for a king (85mm) size. The point is still made I guess, but it does lessen your creditability somewhat.
At Sat Feb 24, 08:38:00 PM 2007,
Anonymous said…
Your comment highlights an important point about cigarette smoking - people do it differently. The average smoker takes about 12 puffs per cigarette, with around 30 seconds between each puff, with the cigarette lasting about 6 minutes. But this can vary from only a few quick puffs to as many as 25 puffs per cigarette. It has been shown that the smoking style (and therefore time to smoke the cigarette)is influenced by such factors as nicotine yield of the cigarette and whether or not it is mentholated. So if you are smoking your cigarettes in 3 minutes you are an unusually fast smoker, and you are correct that someone taking 11 minutes is an unusually slow smoker. Everyone is different. The fact remains that regardless of how long it takes you, as an individual, to smoke each cigarette, continuing to smoke is likely to take about 10 years off your life.
Dr Jonathan Foulds
At Mon Feb 26, 10:37:00 AM 2007,
Jonathan Foulds, MA, MAppSci, PhD said…
In 1992 I published a study that required me to observe 30 smokers smoking a cigarette on 3 afternoons, one week apart. On each occasion I measured the number of puffs, how long it took them to smoke it, and also took a measure of their blood nicotine and exhaled carbon-monoxide before and after the cigarette. On some of the sessions the smokers wore nicotine or placebo patches (I was interested in whether wearing the nicotine patch reduced their smoke/nicotine intake). However, with regards to your point about how long it takes to smoke a cigarette, in that study the average time to smoke a cigarette on the no-patch days was just under 8 minutes (averaging just under 9 puffs). People vary considerably in how long they take to smoke a cigarette. In fact the key issue is not how long they take to smoke it but the total volume of smoke inhaled, as that determines the amount of nicotine and toxins absorbed by the body. People who smoke lights or menthols tend to inhale more smoke from each cigarette, as do people who are trying to cut down.
FYI the link to the summary of that study is:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=1570391&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
If you are interested in my more recent publications, some of these are downloadable in full from the following link:
http://www.tobaccoprogram.org/staffarticles.htm
However, given that 8 minutes isn’t so far from 11, I hope you will consider my credibility intact. I take your point that the average cigarette takes a bit less than 11 minutes to smoke. It may be therefore be more accurate to say that for every minute a smoker spends smoking, they shorten their life by around 1-2 minutes.
At Mon Aug 06, 10:34:00 AM 2007,
Anonymous said…
He did not say that smoking a cigarette takes 11 minutes- he said it takes 11 minutes OFF YOUR LIFE. Do you people really need any more convincing that smoking is bad for you?
At Mon Sep 10, 10:06:00 PM 2007,
Anonymous said…
not only do cigarettes come in different brands but they also come in different lengths.therefore cigarettes that take 11 minutes are most likely 100mm. also some smokers like to smoke the cigarette to the end of the filter while others throw it away when its half way done.
At Tue Jan 15, 08:16:00 AM 2008,
Anonymous said…
11 minutes is almost 40% longer than 8 minutes. And from my experience with smokers, they usually take less than 8 minutes to smoke a cigarette. More like 5 or 6 minutes.
I get your point but at the end of the day you should make sure what you're writing is accurate if you want to make your article appear credible - especially when you're going into such specifics about what the different straws represent etc in your example.
At Tue Jan 15, 06:36:00 PM 2008,
Jonathan Foulds, MA, MAppSci, PhD said…
Hi Anonymous of Jan 15,
I take your point.
I was trying to be careful not to overestimate the average effect of smoking one cigarette (by underestimating how long it takes to smoke it, which can vary).
I hope we're not missing the main point here, which is that every minute spent smoking, on average, reduces the length of your life by 1-2 minutes.
At Thu Jan 31, 08:39:00 AM 2008,
Anonymous said…
Why are we debating the "time" issue? The Doc was just making an analogy as there are many variables to consider. Who cares if it takes 5 or 11 minutes to smoke a cigarette. We all know if we smoke, we will die prematurely - end of statement. What's so hard to understand. Quit trying to pick apart Dr. Foulds clinical study and worry about trying to stay healthy.
At Sun Jun 29, 07:52:00 PM 2008,
Anonymous said…
These comments are hilarious! No one seems to have noticed the point that he made that each cigarette takes 11 minutes off your life, as in you live 11 minutes less on average for each cigarette you smoke, it does not refer to the amount of time it takes to smoke a cigarette!!
At Tue Jul 01, 12:30:00 PM 2008,
Jonathan Foulds, MA, MAppSci, PhD said…
Bingo,
I think that Anon of June 29th 9and a few other commenters) got the point. Eureka.
At Tue Aug 12, 11:23:00 PM 2008,
kiwisoup said…
HAHAHA, people are seriously idiots. Wow...talk about stupidity. You're not losing minutes of your life because you are smoking instead of doing something else. You're losing 11 minutes in addition to how ever long it takes you to smoke, hence taking minutes off your life!
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