🫀 Tobacco doesn't just age your lungs — it ages your blood vessels
The harm of smoking isn't only about lungs. Smoke enters the blood and puts a daily load on your vessels and heart.
When people think of the harm tobacco does, they picture the lungs first.
Coughing, breathlessness, lung cancer. Those are real and they are big. But breathing isn't the only thing tobacco damages. Smoke passes from the lungs into the blood, and the blood carries it through the vessels to the whole body. Tobacco doesn't stay where you inhaled it.
The WHO describes tobacco use as a leading risk factor for cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, and more than twenty kinds of cancer. The CDC likewise shows that quitting lowers cardiovascular risk, and that the carbon monoxide in your blood drops toward the level of someone who doesn't smoke. Smoke doesn't only dirty the lungs — it adds unnecessary strain to the vessels and worsens the conditions the heart has to work under.