Quitting Smoking Is Contagious
May 23, 2008
From CBS News
The urge to smoke is contagious, but quitting apparently is, too.
A team of researchers who showed that obesity can spread person-to-person has found a similar pattern with smoking cessation: A smoker is more likely to kick the habit if a spouse, friend, co-worker or sibling did.What’s more, smokers tend to quit in groups and those who don’t stop puffing increasingly find themselves pushed to the edge of their social circles, the researchers found.
“Your smoking behavior depends upon not just the smoking behavior of the people you know, but also the people who they know” and so on, said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the new report.
Heart attack: Top 9 risk factors
May 18, 2008
From Health 24
One of the world’s widest studies into heart attacks has identified nine risk factors that account for nine out of 10 of all cardiac arrests, with cholesterol, smoking and stress topping the table.
People who have high lipid concentrations in the blood or who smoke account for roughly 60 percent of all heart attacks, according to the study, published online Friday by the British medical weekly The Lancet.Someone with high blood cholesterol faces a 3,25 higher risk of a heart attack than someone with normal levels; someone who smokes has a 2,9 higher risk than a person who has never smoked.
10 Minutes to Better Health
May 18, 2008
From Health 24
By Susan Erasmus
Water, water everywhere. Drink at least 6 glasses of water a day. Remember tea and coffee actually dehydrate you. That puffy look in the morning, means you are dehydrated.
Tomato trick. Tomato, in all its forms, containes lycopene, a very powerful antioxidant, which helps your body fight cancer. If you don’t like raw tomato, tomato sauce or tomato paste will have almost the same effect. You can also get it in supplement form: it’s called Lyc-O-Mato, which the manufacturers claim concentrates the lycopene from non genetically modified, organically-grown tomatoes.
Still Smoking? So Dangerous
May 18, 2008
From Health 24
Linda and Ian adore their children. Only the best is good enough for five-year-old Danny and baby Emma. They spend a lot of quality time with them, doing all the things parents would like to do to stimulate their offspring intellectual potential.
Linda is a smoker, but restricts her smoking to the living rooms and kitchen. She does not smoke in the car when Danny and Emma are with her and never in the kids?rooms.
She was shocked when her GP informed her that Danny had already inhaled the equivalent of 102 packets of cigarettes by his fifth birthday because he is living in the same house as a smoking parent. And that both Danny and Emma have an increased risk of asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases due to their exposure to second-hand smoke.
Please Quit Smoking!
May 4, 2008
From Health 24
Quitting smoking is hard, there’s no doubt about it. However, if you can tough it out for at least two years, chances are good you’ll never light another cigarette again.
That’s the conclusion of a new study that appears in the March issue of Nicotine and Tobacco Research. Health experts found two years after quitting smoking, only two to four percent of ex-smokers picked up the habit again each year.
“Once [ex-smokers] got past 10 years, relapse rates fell to very low amounts, less than one percent,” says study author Elizabeth Krall, an associate professor of health policy and health services at Boston University’s School of Dental Medicine.
Wine Coupled With Second Hand Smoke May Damage Heart
March 8, 2008
From Foxnews.com
A glass of wine may be good for the heart, but coupled with second-hand smoke — and you may be hurting your health, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham tested the effects of drinking alcohol while inhaling second-hand smoke. They found the combination increases the damage cigarette smoke has on the heart.
The researchers reported that mice exposed to smoky air in a laboratory enclosure and fed a liquid diet containing ethanol (the intoxicating ingredient in alcohol) had a 4.7-fold increase in artery lesions, compared to mice breathing normal air and eating a normal diet.
Artery lesions are a common problem in heavy smokers and a sign of advancing cardiovascular disease, according to the study, which is published in the journal “Free Radical Biology & Medicine.”
The researchers reported mice solely exposed to the smoky air had a 2.3-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice who breathed filtered air. Mice solely fed a liquid diet containing ethanol had a 3.5-fold increase in artery lesions when compared to mice fed a normal diet.
