Tobacco smoke is incredibly harmful to human health. There’s no safe way to smoke. No matter how it is done, tobacco is dangerous to health. Replacing the cigarette with a cigar, pipe, or hookah will not help in avoiding health risks. The substances inhaled do not just affect the lungs, but the entire body.
There are no safe substances in any tobacco product. Cigarettes contain about 600 ingredients, which upon burning generate numerous chemicals. These chemicals enter the blood through the lungs and are poisonous to the body while some of them are even linked to cancer.
These chemicals can directly damage the DNA of the cell making them susceptible to mutations and subsequently cancer development. These chemicals also weaken our immune defense system, decreasing their ability to fight cancer cells. This way some cancers, which are not directly related to smoking, can grow in an unabated way due to impaired body defense. Some cancers are associated with viral infections. But due to an impaired defense system of the body of the smokers, these viruses are not killed, leading to cancer development.
Smoking can cause cancer almost anywhere in the body. But the most common sites include Lungs, Urinary bladder, Mouth, kidney, pancreas, and cervix. Recent work has also implicated smoking in the risk of some blood cancers. Literature confirms that continued smoking by cancer patients and survivors increases the overall death rate. However, the good news is that leaving smoking even after the diagnosis of any cancer in a smoker provides significant benefits.