Nicotine in small doses acts as a stimulant to the brain. In large doses, it's a depressant, inhibiting the flow of signals between nerve cells. In larger doses, it's a lethal poison, affecting the heart, blood vessels, and hormones.
As a cigarette is smoked, the amount of tar inhaled into the lungs increases, and the last puff contains more than twice as much tar as the first puff. Carbon monoxide makes it harder for red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout the body. Tar is a mixture of substances that together form a sticky mass in the lungs.
Most of the chemicals inhaled in cigarette smoke stay in the lungs. The more you inhale, the greater the damage to the lungs.
What's In Cigarette Smoke?
Cigarette smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals, including 43 known cancer-causing (carcinogenic) compounds and 400 other toxins. These include nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide, as well as formaldehyde, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, arsenic, and DDT.
When Nicotine is inhaled into the lungs, the nicotine reaches your brain in six seconds.
Nicotine is a depressant. It inhibiting the flow of signals between nerve cells. In larger doses, it's a lethal poison, affecting the heart, blood , hormones.
As a cigarette is smoked, the amount of tar inhaled into the lungs increases. Carbon monoxide makes it harder for red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout the body. Tar is a mixture of substances that together form a sticky mass in the lungs.
Most of the chemicals inhaled in cigarette smoke stay in the lungs. The more you inhale, the damage is bigger to your lungs.
The incredients in cigredients contained in its the ingredients in iincluding molasses, phenylacetic acid and patchouli.
It also contains high fructose corn syrup, sugar, natural and artificial licorice flavor, menthol, artificial milk chocolate and natural chocolate flavor, valerian root extract, molasses and vanilla extracts, and cedarwood oil. Less familiar additives include glycerol, propylene glycol, isovaleric acid, hexanoic acid and 3-methylpentanoic acid.
Some 600 ingredients are used in cigarettes.
Cigarette flavours have gone through many changes since cigarettes were first made. Initially, cigarettes were unfiltered, allowing the full "flavor" of the tar to come through. As the public became concerned about the health effects of smoking, filters were added. While this helped alleviate the public's fears, the result was a cigarette that tasted too bitter.
Filters Don't Work
Filters do not remove enough tar to make cigarettes less dangerous. They are just trick you into thinking you are smoking a safer cigarette.
The solution to the bitter-tasting cigarette was easy -- have some chemists add taste-improving chemicals to the tobacco. Unfortunately, some of these chemicals also cause cancer.
But not all of the chemicals in your cigarettes are there for taste enhancement. For example, a chemical very similar to rocket fuel helps keep the tip of the cigarette burning at an extremely hot temperature. This allows the nicotine in tobacco to turn into a vapor so your lungs can absorb it more easily.
Toilet Bowl Cleaner?
By adding ammonia to your cigarettes, nicotine in its vapor form can be absorbed through your lungs more quickly. This, in turn, means your brain can get a higher dose of nicotine with each puff.
Some of chemicals added to your cigarettes :
Fungicides and pesticides -- Cause many types of cancers and birth defects.
Cadmium -- Linked to lung and prostate cancer.
Benzene -- Linked to leukemia.
Formaldehyde -- Linked to lung cancer.
Nickel -- Causes increased susceptibility to lung infections.
Many of these chemicals were added to make you better able to tolerate toxic amounts of cigarette smoke.
Regardless of the countless chemicals in your cigarettes, quitting is always your option.
Perhaps this list of ingredients that are found in cigarettes is enough to make you want to quit smoking for good!
There are more than 4,000 ingredients in a cigarette other than tobacco. Common additives include yeast, wine, caffeine, beeswax and chocolate.
Here are some other ingredients:
Ammonia: Household cleaner
Angelica root extract: Known to cause cancer in animals
Arsenic: Used in rat poisons
Benzene: Used in making dyes, synthetic rubber
Butane: Gas; used in lighter fluid
Carbon monoxide: Poisonous gas
Cadmium: Used in batteries
Cyanide: Deadly poison
DDT: A banned insecticide
Ethyl Furoate: Causes liver damage in animals
Lead: Poisonous in high doses
Formaldehiyde: Used to preserve dead specimens
Megastigmatrienone: Chemical naturally found in grapefruit juice
Maltitol: Sweetener for diabetics
Napthalene: Ingredient in mothballs
Methyl isocyanate: Its accidental release killed 2000 people in Bhopal, India in 1984
Polonium: Cancer-causing radioactive element
What's in a Cigarette?
by K. H. Ginzel, M.D.
For those who still don't know — let me emphatically state that cigarette smoking is a true addiction! To grasp this well-documented fact, one really doesn't have to study all the supporting scientific evidence. One simply needs more than 4,000 hazardous compounds are present in the smoke that smokers draw into their lungs and which escapes into the environment between puffs.
According to chemists at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, cigarette smoke is 10,000 times more concentrated than the automobile pollution at rush hour on a freeway.
But visible smoke contributes only 5-8% to the total output of a cigarette. The remaining bulk that cannot be seen makes up the so-called vapor or gas phase of cigarette "smoke." It contains, besides nitrogen and oxygen, a bewildering assortment of toxic gases, such as carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, acrolein, hydrogen cyanide, and nitrogen oxides, to name just a few. Smokers efficiently extract almost 90% of the particulate as well as gaseous constituents (about 50% in the case of carbon monoxide) from the mainstream smoke of the 600 billion cigarettes consumed annually in the U.S.
The witch's brew of poisons invades the organs and tissues of smokers and nonsmokers, adults and children, born as well as unborn, and causes cancer, emphysema, heart disease, fetal growth retardation and other problems during pregnancy. The harm inflicted by all other addictions combined pales in comparison. Smoking-related illness, for example, claims in a few days as many victims as cocaine does in a whole year. Hence, disease is in a cigarette.
In addition, there is the chemical burden from sidestream smoke, afflicting smokers and non-smokers alike. Based on the reported concentrations in enclosed, cigarette smoke-polluted areas, the estimated intakes of nicotine, acrolein, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde peak at 200, 130, 75, 7, and 3 times the ADI, respectively. The high exposure to acrolein is especially unsettling. This compound is not only a potent respiratory irritant, but qualifies, according to current studies, as a carcinogen.
Regulatory policy aims at restricting exposure to carcinogens to a level where the lifetime risk of cancer would not exceed 1 in 100,000 to 1,000,000. Due to a limited database, approximate upper lifetime risk values could be calculated for only 7 representative cigarette smoke carcinogens. The risk values were extraordinarily high, ranging from 1 in 6,000 to 1 in 16. Because of the awesome amount of carcinogens found in cigarette smoke and the fact that carcinogens combine their individual actions in an additive or even multiplicative fashion, it is not surprising that the actual risk for lung cancer is as high as one in ten. Hence, cancer is in a cigarette.
Among the worst offenders are the nitrosamines. Strictly regulated by federal agencies, their concentrations in beer, bacon, and baby bottle nipples must not exceed 5 to 10 parts per billion. A typical person ingests about one microgram a day, while the smokers' intake tops this by 17 times for each pack of cigarette smoked. In 1976, a rocket fuel manufacturer in the Baltimore area was emitting dimethylnitrosamine into the surrounding air, exposing the local inhabitants to an estimated 14 micrograms of the carcinogen per day. The plant was promptly shut down. However eagerly the government tries to protect us from outdoor pollution and the carcinogenic risk of consumer products, it blatantly suspends control if the offending chemical is in, or comes from, a cigarette. Hence, hypocrisy is in a cigarette.
killing every year two and one-half to three million people worldwide. All things added together: death is in a cigarette.
K. H. Ginzel, M.D., is Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arkansas. His work is concentrated in the area of nicotine and its effects.
Now that you have read the above, do you want some help to Quit cigarettes? Simply contact Vilma from the Vitality Clinic and we can discuss your positive future without cigarettes!