Tobacco and your Health

Tobacco is the NUMBER 1 cause of preventable death and disease in the United States!

NICOTINE ADDICTION šŸ§ 

Nicotine is addictive. Period.

Addiction is a disease. It is the overwhelming desire to find and use a drug, despite the harmful consequences.

Nicotine causes changes in your brain chemistry and can affect the way your brain develops.

DENoble Files Recap

As this video explains, nicotine makes you feel good. In fact, it makes you feel REALLY GOOD. Nicotine gives your brain a huge rush of dopamine, a chemical in your brain that is responsible for keeping you happy.

Your brain is used to normal levels of dopamine that are released, for example, when you score a touchdown or watch your favorite movie. But your brain doesn't actually like being FLOODED with the HIGH amounts of dopamine that nicotine sends out. It gets overwhelmed.

So, your brain cells try to muffle the effect of nicotine by growing "earmuffs," as the video says.

Now, the only way your brain can communicate to "feel good" again, is to have more of the drug in your brain.

Those earmuffs can develop really quickly, but can take years to un-do. A nicotine addiction can happen very fast, but can take a long time to break.

88% of adult smokers started smoking before the age of 18

(That means if we had 100 smokers in a room, 88 of those people would have started smoking in high school or before! )

Your brain is developing until the age of 25. In this period of development, your brain is more susceptible to nicotine addiction. That's why people who try drugs, like nicotine and alcohol, as teenagers have a much higher chance of developing a life-long addiction.

TOBACCO's IMPACT ON THE BODY

Scroll through the photos below to see some of the diseases that, research shows, can be reduced or prevented by not using tobacco products.

Tobacco has HUGE impacts on your lungs, heart, and brain

Consider things you wouldn't be able to do, for example, if your lungs didn't work well? Singing, sports, walking around Disney World, or hiking a mountain to see the sunrise.

This impacts not only your health, but also your quality of life and the way you experience life with your friends and family.

smoking has been shown to cause 12 types of cancer

That's right! It's not JUST lung cancer that can result from smoking, though that is usually the first one that comes to mind for most people.

This image points out 12 different types of cancer in the body that have established links to smoking.