The labels on the cigarettes give you your first clue. Smoking isn't safe. When people first started smoking cigarettes many years ago, they didn't realize what kinds of dangers came with lighting up on a regular basis. In the beginning, it was just a way of socializing, of looking cool. People who were addicted to cigarettes from years of smoking before they found out what harmful effects they could cause understandably have had a lot of problems giving them up. The addiction was already there. What is hard to understand is why young people still smoke today even though we know what it can do to their bodies.

Smoking can lead to heart attacks and stroke. By slowing down the flow of your blood, it puts a strain on your heart and blood vessels. This can lead to tissue death in limbs and even amputation. Tar from cigarettes will coat your lungs and lead to cancer. If you've ever listened to yourself or someone who is a smoker cough, you will hear the rattle of unhealthy lungs. It has been shown that using low-tar cigarettes is ineffective because smokers tend to drag the smoke deeper into their lungs.

Since you will have clogged blood vessels and coated lungs, it is easy to understand why you won't be taking in as much oxygen as would a nonsmoker. Your muscles need oxygen to function as do your brain and body tissues. Second hand smoke may lead to asthma in babies born to smoking mothers and the chances increase if parents and others continue to smoke in the home. They also have lower birth weights. For the smoker, the strain put on your body can lead to Emphysema, a disease that will slowly rot your lungs and cause a slow death. The Emphysema may cause chronic bronchitis and the strain can lead to heart and lung failure.

Smoking can lead to strokes. Since it causes fat deposits in your blood vessels, those vessels narrow and a stroke can occur. This can also lead to a heart attack. One in five deaths from heart disease is caused by smoking except in younger people where it is three out of four.

Cancers other than lung may not be directly linked to smoking. However, there are more smokers who develop almost every type of cancer than do non-smokers. Smoking increases your risks for any of them. There is only one exception, the high rate of lung cancer among women who don't smoke. Researchers haven't found conclusive evidence to what causes this, but it is one exception, not the rule.

When the Surgeon General's Report stated that "Cigarette smoking is the major single cause of cancer mortality in the United States" in 1982, it wasn't just an opinion. It was a fact backed by research and statistics of deaths in the US. Why, then, when it's still true today, have people not given up the habit?

Smoking is the most preventable cause of disease and premature death we face.

At least 30% of all cancers are a result of smoking cigarettes and about 87% of lung cancer deaths. If it became a requirement to put in the obituaries if a person had smoked and died of a smoke-related illness, maybe smokers would no longer be able to deny the dangers of smoking. Possibly the daily reminders would let smokers know that cigarettes are dangerous and can limit your quality, as well as quantity of life.

The most popular reason for youngsters to start the habit, is to look "cool". However, tobacco yellows your teeth, makes your skin look sallow, and prematurely wrinkles your face. Eventually, you will look anything but cool from smoking.

If you think that cigarettes can't be as harmful as everyone says because they are "natural" and made from tobacco that is grown on a farm, think again. Chemicals are added in the growing process and later for flavor enhancement and other things. There are more than sixty chemicals found in tobacco and tobacco smoke that are carcinogenic (cancer causing).

If you haven't started smoking, then don't. If you are a smoker, no matter for how long, you can quit. A lot of programs and drugs show some progress. It's not too late to improve your odds and your quality of life.