At first, they may just be curious. Or, they may be trying to fit in with their mates. Smoking is daring and exciting.
Most teenagers start smoking because they care about their personal appearance, physical fitness, and the main one is popularity.
On the other hand there are many reasons why teenagers should not start smoking at such a young age. Among young people, the short-term health consequences of smoking include respiratory and non-respiratory effects, addiction to nicotine, and associated risk of other drug use.
Long-term health consequences of youth smoking are reinforced by the fact that most people who smoke regularly continue to smoke throughout adulthood.
Most of the effects are to do with health. Cigarette smokers have a lower level of lung function than those people who have never smoked. Smoking reduces the rate of lung growth. In adults cigarette smoking causes heart disease and stroke. But studies have shown that early signs of these diseases can be found in teenagers who smoke.
Smoking hurts young people’s physical fitness in terms of both performance and endurance. Smoking at an early age increases the risk of lung cancer.
Teenage smokers suffer from shortness of breath almost three times as of ten as teens who don’t smoke.
Teens who smoke are three times more likely than nonsmokers to use alcohol, eight times more likely to use marijuana, and twenty two times more likely to use cocaine. Smoking is the reason why most teenagers turn out to do some risky behaviors, such as fighting and unprotected sex.
Many teenagers think that smoking makes you look attractive, but they are wrong. Smoking causes bad breathe, yellow teeth, gun disease, hacking coughs, excess phlegm, smelly hair, stained fingers, and burn holes in your favourite clothes. Most teenagers do not want to go out with, much less kiss, someone who smokes.
Teenagers think that cigarettes help you to relax. Actually, the opposite is true. Smoking can make your heart and blood pressure go up with just one puff. About one half hour after you smoke a cigarette, the nicotine wears off. Your body craves more and you can’t relax until you have another cigarette. So, in reality, cigarettes do not help you to relax. The second cigarette relieves the tension created by the first one.
Some teenagers think it is easy to quit smoking. Most people who smoke have been smoking since they were teenagers. And the younger they were when they started smoking, the more likely they are to be heavy smokers.
Teenagers who smoke tend to have babies with lower birth weights. Miscarriages for a smoker is almost double that of non-smokers. Also, babies of smoking mothers are more likely to have respiratory infections during the first year of life.
From this you can see that smoking has a big effect on the teenagers that smoke. There are not much advantages of smoking as people know it harms the body and can also kill, the information shows there are many bad points to smoking. After knowing this most of the teenagers still smoke, even thought they know that it is going to have a bad effect on them some day. They know that they are most likely to suffer from cancers, and circulatory and respiratory system diseases. These horrible illnesses were known to originate from cigarettes for years, and recently the Food and Drug Administration declared nicotine, the main chemical additive in cigarettes, addictive. This explains why smokers continue to use cigarettes even though smokers are aware of the constantly warned about health dangers in cigarettes. Although smokers constitute the majority of people who suffer from cigarettes, they are not the only ones ailing from cigarette smoke. The amount of second-hand smoke inhaled by the typical nonsmoker is equivalent to one cigarette smoked per day. Even that amount of cigarette smoke can damage a person's heart.
For years cigarettes have been known to cause cancer, emphysema, and other horrible illnesses. With all the other causes of preventable deaths, alcohol, illegal drugs, aids, suicide, transportation accidents, fires, and guns, cigarettes still account for more preventable deaths than those do combined.
Nashath Akhtar
