Everyone knows about the dangers of smoking, and even as a child vows never to smoke. However, few people keep their word – almost everyone has tried smoking, and many develop a detrimental addiction. If you smoke while eating, playing lightning roulette, or even after a workout and haven’t yet found a strong motivation to quit, then try to follow a few tips to help reduce the harm from your habit.
Doctor’s Tips
The first group of rules includes purely medical deductions, which can be confirmed by any doctor. To reduce the harm of smoking, the negative effects of nicotine and reduce the risk of cancer, then:
- Drink more water. This allows you to flush out toxins faster, stimulate the kidneys, and avoid the concentration of nicotine in the urine, and thus its negative effects on the bladder.
- Don’t keep your cigarette in your mouth. The toxic gasses produced by the cigarette are detrimental to your facial skin, tooth enamel, and lip mucosa.
- Don’t smoke cheap cigarettes. When you buy an expensive pack, you pay not only for the package design but also for the quality tobacco, the careful processing of the tobacco paper, and the reliable filter.
- Work out in moderation. Strenuous exercise is dangerous for smokers: it speeds up your heart, while nicotine constricts your arteries, preventing blood from flowing away from your heart.
- Avoid menthol cigarettes. The presence of menthol increases the causticity of some of the toxic elements found in tobacco.
- Smoke your first cigarette only after breakfast. Don’t smoke on an empty stomach and, especially, in the morning on an empty stomach, because the products of tobacco distillation mix with saliva and affect the mucous membrane of the stomach, and from the intestines are immediately absorbed into the blood, for the same reason don’t smoke during eating or drinking and refuse to chew while smoking.
- Don’t light a poorly lit cigarette. A poorly lit cigarette increases a smoker’s carbon monoxide intake by one-third.
- Go out for a smoke break and get some fresh air. This way your lungs will clear faster and your skin and hair won’t absorb the smoke.
- Take your time to smoke your cigarette. If your bus approaches or you need to return urgently to the workplace, put out the cigarette, but do not take quick and deep puffs. The optimal time to smoke one cigarette is 5 to 7 minutes.
How to Eat
Smokers should pay more attention to their diet. Therefore, besides a lunchtime cigarette, include something else in the menu:
- Carrots, garlic, and oranges are natural antidotes to tobacco smoke, so start eating vegetable and fruit salads and juices.
- Drink green tea. Green tea contains substances that can clear nicotine from your bronchi.
- Take vitamins. To neutralize nicotine toxins, you need to take vitamins E, C and A regularly, as well as selenium. Besides “naked” pills from the drugstore, vitamin A is found in brightly colored fruits and vegetables (carrots, pumpkin, mangoes, apricots, etc.), as well as in spinach, lettuce, green peas, sorrel, green onions, fish oil, cottage cheese, liver, and eggs. Foods containing vitamin A should be kept out of the air and out of the light. Vegetables shouldn’t be washed with hot water. Vegetable oils are a source of vitamin E. It’s also found in liver, eggs, wholemeal flour, buckwheat and oat groats, and legumes.
- Love fish. It contains special fatty unsaturated acids that prevent increased blood clotting. As a result, the danger of blood clots is reduced.
- Limit your consumption of fatty, smoked foods and alcohol. Epidemiological studies show a direct link between fat consumption and the incidence of breast and colorectal cancer, and excessive alcohol consumption combined with tobacco smoke leads to oral, esophageal, liver, and breast cancer.