6 ms·

Single cigarette takes 20 minutes off life expectancy, study finds

38 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

fithisux 2y ago
[flagged]
- not_your_vase 2y ago
  Not only that, but governments didn't do jackshit about vaping, all around the world. At least classic tobacco smoking is decreasing, finally there was a chance to make it disappear in a generation or two, and make the tobacco companies die. But no - instead the world just let recreational vaping spread like wildfire.
  - Foobar8568 2y ago
    Fuck that shit, really, fuck it. One of the aspects I hate about Europe is cigarettes, vaping and weed everywhere. You can't be outside without breathing that shit. Switzerland being one of the worse offenders where we have basically all the HQ lobbying politicians (others being health care insurances, pharma and banks). And let's just bury the whole Asia continent on that topic.
    - grujicd 2y ago
      Don't come to Serbia, as we still allow smoking inside in bars, clubs and even restaurants!
    - waihtis 2y ago
      You should avoid NY at all costs
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    What's wrong with vaping?
  - rogue7 2y ago
    Vaping is way less harmful than smoking. See e.g. the study [0] conducted by Public Health England that concludes vaping is at least 95% (!) less harmful than smoking. See also this video [1] that shows graphically the different impact it has on the lungs. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-less-harmful-than-tobacco-estimates-landmark-review https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le... [1] https://youtu.be/0Pwj6BuS8Ds https://youtu.be/0Pwj6BuS8Ds
    - not_your_vase 2y ago
      > independent study > at least one author has relations with Ruyan group (today part of Imperial Tobacco), a then-major vape manufacturer But even this "independent study" seems to acknowledge the difference between recreational vaping, and using vape as a tool to stop smoking. Do you believe everything that's on TV, or are you just a run of the mill tobacco company shill? The only reason I want to live until 2050 is to see the lawsuits that will mirror the smoking lawsuits from the early 90s. (But this time they will be lead by Instagram and TikTok influencers - not that it will take any of the value)
- xenospn 2y ago
  Same as red meat and alcohol. People really like it. Who are you to tell them to stop?
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    I guess smoking always messes with the health of people around you, even moderate; people breath that smoke unless you live alone in some forest. Eating red meat or drink a beer (aka moderate as well, although red meat you can also do in extremes for this to hold) hurts only you. Well, unless public healthcare, then it 'hurts' all tax payers; however, then you can talk about social media (mental health) and sugar as well for that list.
    - caeril 2y ago
      > Well, unless public healthcare, then it 'hurts' all tax payers No, it also hurts private insurance customers( in the US ). Healthy weight people, and those who exercise are subsidizing the premiums of people who refuse to put down the fork and move occasionally, because it's illegal to discriminate premiums based on obvious risk factors like bodyfat %. My family pays $2700/mo in premiums for a shit-tier PPO in order to support the gluttony of everyone around us. We very rarely even use the insurance.
      - anonzzzies 2y ago
        Public healthcare is not insurance; it's 'free' (paid by taxes), for instance like in Portugal. But yes, your point stands. The healthy young pay for ill and old. What would you change? Any suggestions I heard in the past, will include some perverse vagueness to screw people over. Smoking, drinking, overweight should pay more; how much? What amounts; are we doing it tiered; does that make sense; do people who are 30kg overweight cause lesss issues than 40? Who decides that? If you let the insurers decide, they would fuck you over for 1kg too much. What if you stop smoking or drinking or eating red meat; it goes down over time? How do you prove that? Really nothing works without people who do something stupid during a (possibly stressful, mental health issue etc) period in their lives getting screwed when they need help most. And does it go for red meat? I know people in some US states would go against that: here it is considered incredibly unhealthy for your vascular system and actively discouraged more than a few grams a month. When is proof, proof enough? And mental health? If you are a bully in school or a toxic colleague, should you pay more? How much, how long? You likely did cost more pain and messed up others for a higher $ than an obese person, so a looot more then yes? Should rich offenders pay more than poor offenders? Poor are more likely to smoke and drink and be overweight, but they also are barely making ends meet as it is, while many of the rich (your two new presidents for instance) are overweight and hoarding wealth. How do you change it without getting into a worse shitshow than it already is?
- cultofmetatron 2y ago
  me smoking a cigarette doesn't also cause other people around me to lose 20 min off their life without their consent. Wontonly spreading a virus does. that said, I'm not a fan of smoking and there's obviously issues with second hand smoke. but it doesn't have the same exponential damage effect of an infectious disease.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - fithisux 2y ago
    Smokers deplete the health system from resources. So, it is the same.
    - cultofmetatron 2y ago
      you're not wrong but its a rounding error compared to the resources sucked up to pay the salaries of the ceos and board members of these giant health insurance companies. If we're going for efficiency of health system resources use, better to start with them.
readthenotes1 2y ago
I wonder how long my great grandad would have lived if he hadn't smoked? He started smoking at 10 and died at 90. Their math says roughly to 109.
- smokel 2y ago
  That's not how expectancy works. Perhaps if you had n great grandads, with n approaching infinity, on average they would make it to 109. But there is no telling for your own particular grandad.
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    Hm Is the 20 minutes/cigarette solid then?
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  My grandfather smoked packs of cigs/day from his 11th when he started working his parents fields. My mother never saw him without a sigaretten in his mouth. Died obese and still smoking at 96 suddenly (no known health issues). Seems a lot longer, but of course he wouldn't. And a lot less happy I think: the guy never stopped smiling and cracking jokes and singing; he liked his drink, smoke and a lot of food; if he would have to let those go, I think it would've made him very different. Will never know of course.
  - gyomu 2y ago
    All of my grandparents lived well into their 90s. Mediterranean people, they loved good food and good wine (a bit of smoking too for some of them), fought/survived WW2, worked fairly rough jobs after, no exercise in the modern sense (eg cardio/strength training). I have a sneaking suspicion our generation won't make it as far as them (and a few of my family members in the generation after have died in their 70s already). A part of me wants to say "chemicals and microplastics" but my grandpa worked in factories with some pretty nasty chemicals so that can't count for nothing (and they drove cars with leaded fuel too). Maybe it is in no small part that they spent more time outdoors, and more time socializing? Or maybe it's all just randomness and none of that has any rhyme or reason.
throwaway290 2y ago
These studies are correlations that ignore complex interactions. Something pushed that guy to smoke and same something also makes him likely to do other things culminating in earlier death. Another guy smokes all his life and lives into 90s with no issues because there was no "something". Another guy dies of suicide in his 30s because of loneliness because he did not have the excuse of cigarette to connect with people
- armada651 2y ago
  Are you arguing that people who smoke are simply predisposed to behaviours that cause lung cancer regardless of whether they smoke?
  - frederikdss 2y ago
    No, he’s not arguing about causation but about correlation. Confounding variables. For example, where I live cigarette use seems related with social class (being more prevalent with the poorer part of our population). That can correlate with living and working conditions, which can impact everything else
  - sellmesoap 2y ago
    From the recent time I was on a construction site: all the carpenters and drywallers etc all went for smoke breaks all the time, use of protective gear was infrequent. This was only one site I saw others with better habits.
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    Smoking seems to cause lung cancer in some people but we don't know what would happen to those people if they didn't smoke. It's likely in some people smoking happens with other habits that would cause one issue or another but in other people it's not that. The studies that try to generalize smoking to life expectancy seem questionable.
- chithanh 2y ago
  Smokers have higher suicide risk than non-smokers. It has been known for decades that smokers have a "smoker personality" which differs from non-smokers. In recent years some evidence emerged that smoking is the cause of this rather than vice versa. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140715141355.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140715141355.h...
keiferski 2y ago
I’m really not a fan of smoking cigarettes at all (although cigars are nice every once in a while), but I do wonder if a study has ever incorporated the social aspects of smoking. Social life does have an effect on life expectancy, although probably not enough to make up for the loss of life caused by smoking. The only real appeal of smoking to me was the fact that one has an instant social situation with other smokers. Nowadays, non-smoking strangers with time to kill end up staring at their phones. Although I wonder if smokers also do the same thing…
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  Well, to have a full understanding you should also factor in the life loss by second hand smokers who involuntarily breath smoke
  - keiferski 2y ago
    I was referring to the life lost by the individual smoker, not life lost at large.
    - irjustin 2y ago
      How would you do this? You can't A/B test an individual's death.
      - keiferski 2y ago
        I guess you could have smokers self-evaluate their social lives and see if any patterns emerge. “When you smoke, do you do it alone or with others?” Etc.
  - imjonse 2y ago
    And let's not forget the social aspects of being second hand smokers connecting emotionally with others in the same unfortunate position and whom they would not connect with otherwise :)
- giuscri 2y ago
pfannkuchen 2y ago
It can't possibly be linear like that, right? Also, I swear the mechanism behind smoking causing cancer is that cells have a different division mode for rapid healing and it's more prone to copying errors than normal cell division. Some of these copying errors break the replication inhibition mechanism, and then you have the accepted thing where some errors are caught by the immune system and eventually you get unlucky and some aren't. This pattern applies to every cancer that I know of (where healing in the case of smoking is tiny burns healing over and over and over again).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- irjustin 2y ago
  Actually, doesn't it have to be linear? I'm having trouble looking up the exact study, the link they provide doesn't actually link the study. But if I were to structure an observational smoking study, I basically track smokers vs non-smokers from the same population. Hope that my n is big enough and then simply track years non-smokers lived longer vs number cigs smoked. Thus linear. Help me - because I can't imagine a different way to run this.
  - randomNumber7 2y ago
    In medicine is often a threshold effect. Only if you cross some threshold, harm is done. I can not imagine that someone who smokes a few cigarettes in their 20s loses the same per cigarette as someone who smokes for years.
    - chithanh 2y ago
      To be more precise: It is not so much a (dose) threshold but how much margin/reserves your body still has. For example kidney injury is progressive, and by the time the kidney's functional reserve is exhausted, things will remain bad until death or kidney transplant. Also for diseases like HIV/AIDS, the cognitive reserve influences how long it takes until HIV associated dementia sets in.
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
aziaziazi 2y ago
Thats over-exaggerated and non linear. My mother smokes 40/day but let’s say 30 because it was’t always so much. How many days lost per year? 3036520/60/24 = 152days She smoke since she was 20 and she’s 64 now. How many years lost in total? (64-20)*152/365 = 18years Life expectancy for women in my country is 85yo. How many years left? 85-18-64 = 3years Oh shit I really hope that’s over exaggerated. I should call her now to tel her I love you. And stop smoking me too. Oh shit I’m crying now (for real)
- dvh 2y ago
  Nohavica's theory of alcoholic mountain comes to the rescue: As you are drinking, you are climbing your alcoholic mountain. While you climb up, everything is ok. Once you crosses the summit and starts going down, nobody can help you. Doctors won't help you, your friends won't help you, you won't help yourself. So what's the problem? Nobody knows how tall is their mountain! So your uncle was drinking whole life and he was fine. Yes, because his mountain was very tall. The scene is from the mocumentary "Year of the devil": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzEgqhMpk5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzEgqhMpk5c
  - aziaziazi 2y ago
    Thanks. Nice story but I’m not sure to grasp the inner meaning. I’ll try to translate the video you shared.
- chithanh 2y ago
  That is not now life expectancy works. You cannot take life expectancy at birth and apply it to adults by subtracting past years of life, because doing so ignores all the people that died in the meantime from related or unrelated causes. Rather you have to take remaining life expectancy at any given age and estimate from there how likely death is within 1 or 5 or 10 years. Also relevant is other existing health issues like COPD. https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult?img=PMC2672796_copd-4-137f7&req=4 https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult?img=PMC2672796_copd...
  - 2y ago
yodsanklai 2y ago
Tobacco is quite interesting. It's not enjoyable. I don't know anyone who enjoyed it the first times they smoked. It takes efforts to get addicted. But once people are, it's extremely hard to quit, and lead you to an early death with quasi-certainty. French author Michel Houellebecq refers to it ironically as a "perfect" drug, in the sense it doesn't provide pleasure, only addiction. Good job US to manage to reduce their use. In my country, it drives me crazy that we're not able to prevent kids and teenagers from smoking, because this is the root of the problem. It's a huge cost for them to pay, and society as whole in term of healthcare.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  It’s not tobacco (Which I’m convinced is not all that bad when stripped of all the processing and chemicals) but it’s whatever they are putting in the cigarettes. Like about of folks here I enjoy a cigar from time to time (1-3 times a year) and suffer none of the addiction problems. The taste and aroma is legitimately nice, like having a nice cup of coffee or a scotch. But after smoking one there is no desire to have more and I’m usually smoked out for a few months to a year.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    It’s tobacco - nicotine is highly addictive. I never smoked normal cigarettes only used self-rolled tobacco without additives and I am still addicted. Smoking cigars is different since they take out most of the nicotine carrying parts - at least that’s how a Cuban cigar maker explained it to me.
    - lores 2y ago
      Nicotine is addictive, but not for long - somewhere between 3 days and one week. I don't smoke cigarettes anymore, but switched to vaping. Despite using no-nicotine liquid for ages, I still have cravings - not at all for real cigarettes, just for inhaling. The psychological addiction is far greater than the physical one.
      - 2y ago
devrop 2y ago
If someone can't get off nicotine, they should switch to smoke-free alternatives such as snus or e-cigarettes.
tetrisgm 2y ago
Are you saying it’s a solution to my lack of retirement plans then?
- draven 2y ago
  Putting the cost of a pack of cigs in a retirement account everyday would be a better plan given their price.
Delphiza 2y ago
In other news "Popular online media outlet publishes story about stopping smoking to generate engagement in time for New Year resolutions. Written in a way that sharing it with family members seems caring instead of pushy". I did get a reasonable article from chatgpt with the prompt "Write a 500 word article about stopping smoking to in time for New Year resolutions. Written in a way that sharing it with family members seems caring instead of pushy. Make it sound like it has a strong medical and scientific foundation. Include statistics about impact on life expectancy". They don't need to have their best journalists around this time of year. It got engagement and clicks from me.
mrbadguy 2y ago
These kinds of announcements are quite misleading IMO. It’s not like smoking a single cigarette immediately takes off 20 minutes, it’s a cumulative effect caused by years of heavy smoking. It’s not particularly meaningful to average that out over the number of cigarettes smoked.
landosaari 2y ago
Jeanne Calment gave up smoking at 117 [0]. Number of people who also lived past 117 is three [1]. Sarah Knauss had a fondness for sweets and hated vegetables [2] lived to 119. Edit: Merely a curio of the people who held number 1 and 2 position of verified oldest people for over two decades. Apologies, if the post suggested otherwise. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_lifestyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_life... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss#Health_and_lifestyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss#Health_and_lifest...
- cr125rider 2y ago
  It’s quite obvious that an incredibly small sample, hand chosen, will be biased.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
quinncom 2y ago
Does that include the 20 minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette? So, the net loss could be 40 minutes?

38 points by isaacfrond 2y ago

fithisux 2y ago

[flagged]

not_your_vase 2y ago
Not only that, but governments didn't do jackshit about vaping, all around the world. At least classic tobacco smoking is decreasing, finally there was a chance to make it disappear in a generation or two, and make the tobacco companies die. But no - instead the world just let recreational vaping spread like wildfire.
- Foobar8568 2y ago
  Fuck that shit, really, fuck it. One of the aspects I hate about Europe is cigarettes, vaping and weed everywhere. You can't be outside without breathing that shit. Switzerland being one of the worse offenders where we have basically all the HQ lobbying politicians (others being health care insurances, pharma and banks). And let's just bury the whole Asia continent on that topic.
  - grujicd 2y ago
    Don't come to Serbia, as we still allow smoking inside in bars, clubs and even restaurants!
  - waihtis 2y ago
    You should avoid NY at all costs
- foxglacier 2y ago
  What's wrong with vaping?
- rogue7 2y ago
  Vaping is way less harmful than smoking. See e.g. the study [0] conducted by Public Health England that concludes vaping is at least 95% (!) less harmful than smoking. See also this video [1] that shows graphically the different impact it has on the lungs. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-less-harmful-than-tobacco-estimates-landmark-review https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le... [1] https://youtu.be/0Pwj6BuS8Ds https://youtu.be/0Pwj6BuS8Ds
  - not_your_vase 2y ago
    > independent study > at least one author has relations with Ruyan group (today part of Imperial Tobacco), a then-major vape manufacturer But even this "independent study" seems to acknowledge the difference between recreational vaping, and using vape as a tool to stop smoking. Do you believe everything that's on TV, or are you just a run of the mill tobacco company shill? The only reason I want to live until 2050 is to see the lawsuits that will mirror the smoking lawsuits from the early 90s. (But this time they will be lead by Instagram and TikTok influencers - not that it will take any of the value)
xenospn 2y ago
Same as red meat and alcohol. People really like it. Who are you to tell them to stop?
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  I guess smoking always messes with the health of people around you, even moderate; people breath that smoke unless you live alone in some forest. Eating red meat or drink a beer (aka moderate as well, although red meat you can also do in extremes for this to hold) hurts only you. Well, unless public healthcare, then it 'hurts' all tax payers; however, then you can talk about social media (mental health) and sugar as well for that list.
  - caeril 2y ago
    > Well, unless public healthcare, then it 'hurts' all tax payers No, it also hurts private insurance customers( in the US ). Healthy weight people, and those who exercise are subsidizing the premiums of people who refuse to put down the fork and move occasionally, because it's illegal to discriminate premiums based on obvious risk factors like bodyfat %. My family pays $2700/mo in premiums for a shit-tier PPO in order to support the gluttony of everyone around us. We very rarely even use the insurance.
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      Public healthcare is not insurance; it's 'free' (paid by taxes), for instance like in Portugal. But yes, your point stands. The healthy young pay for ill and old. What would you change? Any suggestions I heard in the past, will include some perverse vagueness to screw people over. Smoking, drinking, overweight should pay more; how much? What amounts; are we doing it tiered; does that make sense; do people who are 30kg overweight cause lesss issues than 40? Who decides that? If you let the insurers decide, they would fuck you over for 1kg too much. What if you stop smoking or drinking or eating red meat; it goes down over time? How do you prove that? Really nothing works without people who do something stupid during a (possibly stressful, mental health issue etc) period in their lives getting screwed when they need help most. And does it go for red meat? I know people in some US states would go against that: here it is considered incredibly unhealthy for your vascular system and actively discouraged more than a few grams a month. When is proof, proof enough? And mental health? If you are a bully in school or a toxic colleague, should you pay more? How much, how long? You likely did cost more pain and messed up others for a higher $ than an obese person, so a looot more then yes? Should rich offenders pay more than poor offenders? Poor are more likely to smoke and drink and be overweight, but they also are barely making ends meet as it is, while many of the rich (your two new presidents for instance) are overweight and hoarding wealth. How do you change it without getting into a worse shitshow than it already is?
cultofmetatron 2y ago
me smoking a cigarette doesn't also cause other people around me to lose 20 min off their life without their consent. Wontonly spreading a virus does. that said, I'm not a fan of smoking and there's obviously issues with second hand smoke. but it doesn't have the same exponential damage effect of an infectious disease.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- fithisux 2y ago
  Smokers deplete the health system from resources. So, it is the same.
  - cultofmetatron 2y ago
    you're not wrong but its a rounding error compared to the resources sucked up to pay the salaries of the ceos and board members of these giant health insurance companies. If we're going for efficiency of health system resources use, better to start with them.

readthenotes1 2y ago

I wonder how long my great grandad would have lived if he hadn't smoked? He started smoking at 10 and died at 90. Their math says roughly to 109.

smokel 2y ago
That's not how expectancy works. Perhaps if you had n great grandads, with n approaching infinity, on average they would make it to 109. But there is no telling for your own particular grandad.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Hm Is the 20 minutes/cigarette solid then?
anonzzzies 2y ago
My grandfather smoked packs of cigs/day from his 11th when he started working his parents fields. My mother never saw him without a sigaretten in his mouth. Died obese and still smoking at 96 suddenly (no known health issues). Seems a lot longer, but of course he wouldn't. And a lot less happy I think: the guy never stopped smiling and cracking jokes and singing; he liked his drink, smoke and a lot of food; if he would have to let those go, I think it would've made him very different. Will never know of course.
- gyomu 2y ago
  All of my grandparents lived well into their 90s. Mediterranean people, they loved good food and good wine (a bit of smoking too for some of them), fought/survived WW2, worked fairly rough jobs after, no exercise in the modern sense (eg cardio/strength training). I have a sneaking suspicion our generation won't make it as far as them (and a few of my family members in the generation after have died in their 70s already). A part of me wants to say "chemicals and microplastics" but my grandpa worked in factories with some pretty nasty chemicals so that can't count for nothing (and they drove cars with leaded fuel too). Maybe it is in no small part that they spent more time outdoors, and more time socializing? Or maybe it's all just randomness and none of that has any rhyme or reason.

throwaway290 2y ago

These studies are correlations that ignore complex interactions. Something pushed that guy to smoke and same something also makes him likely to do other things culminating in earlier death. Another guy smokes all his life and lives into 90s with no issues because there was no "something". Another guy dies of suicide in his 30s because of loneliness because he did not have the excuse of cigarette to connect with people

armada651 2y ago
Are you arguing that people who smoke are simply predisposed to behaviours that cause lung cancer regardless of whether they smoke?
- frederikdss 2y ago
  No, he’s not arguing about causation but about correlation. Confounding variables. For example, where I live cigarette use seems related with social class (being more prevalent with the poorer part of our population). That can correlate with living and working conditions, which can impact everything else
- sellmesoap 2y ago
  From the recent time I was on a construction site: all the carpenters and drywallers etc all went for smoke breaks all the time, use of protective gear was infrequent. This was only one site I saw others with better habits.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  Smoking seems to cause lung cancer in some people but we don't know what would happen to those people if they didn't smoke. It's likely in some people smoking happens with other habits that would cause one issue or another but in other people it's not that. The studies that try to generalize smoking to life expectancy seem questionable.
chithanh 2y ago
Smokers have higher suicide risk than non-smokers. It has been known for decades that smokers have a "smoker personality" which differs from non-smokers. In recent years some evidence emerged that smoking is the cause of this rather than vice versa. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140715141355.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140715141355.h...

keiferski 2y ago

I’m really not a fan of smoking cigarettes at all (although cigars are nice every once in a while), but I do wonder if a study has ever incorporated the social aspects of smoking. Social life does have an effect on life expectancy, although probably not enough to make up for the loss of life caused by smoking. The only real appeal of smoking to me was the fact that one has an instant social situation with other smokers. Nowadays, non-smoking strangers with time to kill end up staring at their phones. Although I wonder if smokers also do the same thing…

amarcheschi 2y ago
Well, to have a full understanding you should also factor in the life loss by second hand smokers who involuntarily breath smoke
- keiferski 2y ago
  I was referring to the life lost by the individual smoker, not life lost at large.
  - irjustin 2y ago
    How would you do this? You can't A/B test an individual's death.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      I guess you could have smokers self-evaluate their social lives and see if any patterns emerge. “When you smoke, do you do it alone or with others?” Etc.
- imjonse 2y ago
  And let's not forget the social aspects of being second hand smokers connecting emotionally with others in the same unfortunate position and whom they would not connect with otherwise :)
giuscri 2y ago

pfannkuchen 2y ago

It can't possibly be linear like that, right? Also, I swear the mechanism behind smoking causing cancer is that cells have a different division mode for rapid healing and it's more prone to copying errors than normal cell division. Some of these copying errors break the replication inhibition mechanism, and then you have the accepted thing where some errors are caught by the immune system and eventually you get unlucky and some aren't. This pattern applies to every cancer that I know of (where healing in the case of smoking is tiny burns healing over and over and over again).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
irjustin 2y ago
Actually, doesn't it have to be linear? I'm having trouble looking up the exact study, the link they provide doesn't actually link the study. But if I were to structure an observational smoking study, I basically track smokers vs non-smokers from the same population. Hope that my n is big enough and then simply track years non-smokers lived longer vs number cigs smoked. Thus linear. Help me - because I can't imagine a different way to run this.
- randomNumber7 2y ago
  In medicine is often a threshold effect. Only if you cross some threshold, harm is done. I can not imagine that someone who smokes a few cigarettes in their 20s loses the same per cigarette as someone who smokes for years.
  - chithanh 2y ago
    To be more precise: It is not so much a (dose) threshold but how much margin/reserves your body still has. For example kidney injury is progressive, and by the time the kidney's functional reserve is exhausted, things will remain bad until death or kidney transplant. Also for diseases like HIV/AIDS, the cognitive reserve influences how long it takes until HIV associated dementia sets in.

black_13 2y ago

[dead]

aziaziazi 2y ago

Thats over-exaggerated and non linear. My mother smokes 40/day but let’s say 30 because it was’t always so much. How many days lost per year? 3036520/60/24 = 152days She smoke since she was 20 and she’s 64 now. How many years lost in total? (64-20)*152/365 = 18years Life expectancy for women in my country is 85yo. How many years left? 85-18-64 = 3years Oh shit I really hope that’s over exaggerated. I should call her now to tel her I love you. And stop smoking me too. Oh shit I’m crying now (for real)

dvh 2y ago
Nohavica's theory of alcoholic mountain comes to the rescue: As you are drinking, you are climbing your alcoholic mountain. While you climb up, everything is ok. Once you crosses the summit and starts going down, nobody can help you. Doctors won't help you, your friends won't help you, you won't help yourself. So what's the problem? Nobody knows how tall is their mountain! So your uncle was drinking whole life and he was fine. Yes, because his mountain was very tall. The scene is from the mocumentary "Year of the devil": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzEgqhMpk5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzEgqhMpk5c
- aziaziazi 2y ago
  Thanks. Nice story but I’m not sure to grasp the inner meaning. I’ll try to translate the video you shared.
chithanh 2y ago
That is not now life expectancy works. You cannot take life expectancy at birth and apply it to adults by subtracting past years of life, because doing so ignores all the people that died in the meantime from related or unrelated causes. Rather you have to take remaining life expectancy at any given age and estimate from there how likely death is within 1 or 5 or 10 years. Also relevant is other existing health issues like COPD. https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult?img=PMC2672796_copd-4-137f7&req=4 https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult?img=PMC2672796_copd...
- 2y ago

yodsanklai 2y ago

Tobacco is quite interesting. It's not enjoyable. I don't know anyone who enjoyed it the first times they smoked. It takes efforts to get addicted. But once people are, it's extremely hard to quit, and lead you to an early death with quasi-certainty. French author Michel Houellebecq refers to it ironically as a "perfect" drug, in the sense it doesn't provide pleasure, only addiction. Good job US to manage to reduce their use. In my country, it drives me crazy that we're not able to prevent kids and teenagers from smoking, because this is the root of the problem. It's a huge cost for them to pay, and society as whole in term of healthcare.

oceanplexian 2y ago
It’s not tobacco (Which I’m convinced is not all that bad when stripped of all the processing and chemicals) but it’s whatever they are putting in the cigarettes. Like about of folks here I enjoy a cigar from time to time (1-3 times a year) and suffer none of the addiction problems. The taste and aroma is legitimately nice, like having a nice cup of coffee or a scotch. But after smoking one there is no desire to have more and I’m usually smoked out for a few months to a year.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  It’s tobacco - nicotine is highly addictive. I never smoked normal cigarettes only used self-rolled tobacco without additives and I am still addicted. Smoking cigars is different since they take out most of the nicotine carrying parts - at least that’s how a Cuban cigar maker explained it to me.
  - lores 2y ago
    Nicotine is addictive, but not for long - somewhere between 3 days and one week. I don't smoke cigarettes anymore, but switched to vaping. Despite using no-nicotine liquid for ages, I still have cravings - not at all for real cigarettes, just for inhaling. The psychological addiction is far greater than the physical one.
    - 2y ago

devrop 2y ago

If someone can't get off nicotine, they should switch to smoke-free alternatives such as snus or e-cigarettes.

tetrisgm 2y ago

Are you saying it’s a solution to my lack of retirement plans then?

draven 2y ago
Putting the cost of a pack of cigs in a retirement account everyday would be a better plan given their price.

Delphiza 2y ago

In other news "Popular online media outlet publishes story about stopping smoking to generate engagement in time for New Year resolutions. Written in a way that sharing it with family members seems caring instead of pushy". I did get a reasonable article from chatgpt with the prompt "Write a 500 word article about stopping smoking to in time for New Year resolutions. Written in a way that sharing it with family members seems caring instead of pushy. Make it sound like it has a strong medical and scientific foundation. Include statistics about impact on life expectancy". They don't need to have their best journalists around this time of year. It got engagement and clicks from me.

mrbadguy 2y ago

These kinds of announcements are quite misleading IMO. It’s not like smoking a single cigarette immediately takes off 20 minutes, it’s a cumulative effect caused by years of heavy smoking. It’s not particularly meaningful to average that out over the number of cigarettes smoked.

landosaari 2y ago

Jeanne Calment gave up smoking at 117 [0]. Number of people who also lived past 117 is three [1]. Sarah Knauss had a fondness for sweets and hated vegetables [2] lived to 119. Edit: Merely a curio of the people who held number 1 and 2 position of verified oldest people for over two decades. Apologies, if the post suggested otherwise. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_lifestyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Health_and_life... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss#Health_and_lifestyle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Knauss#Health_and_lifest...

cr125rider 2y ago
It’s quite obvious that an incredibly small sample, hand chosen, will be biased.
- deleted 2y ago
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quinncom 2y ago

Does that include the 20 minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette? So, the net loss could be 40 minutes?