How Many Stick Per Day? 5 Benefit of Smoke to Our Health

Who says that smoking cigarettes is so bad ... well, apart from the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and all the medical boards and associations on the face from the earth?

But if smokers have the luck to dodge all that cancer, heart disease, emphysema and the like, they will be protected in a unique way, for reasons not explained by science, against a handful of diseases and afflictions.

Call it a silver lining in your otherwise blackened lungs. While long-term smoking is largely a ticket for premature death, here are (down) five possible benefits of smoking. Take a deep breath

Smoking reduces the risk of knee replacement surgery

While smokers can go bankrupt buying a pack of cigarettes, they can at least save money by avoiding knee replacement surgery. The surprising results of a new study have revealed that men who smoke had less risk of undergoing total joint replacement surgery than those who never smoked.

The study, from the University of Adelaide in Australia, appears in the July issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism. What could be the connection? Knee replacement surgery was more common among runners and obese; smokers rarely run, and are less likely to be morbidly obese.

After controlling for age, weight and exercise, the researchers could not explain the apparent, albeit mild, effects of smoking protection for osteoporosis. It could be that the nicotine in tobacco helps prevent the deterioration of cartilage and joints.

Smoking reduces the risk of Parkinson's disease

Numerous studies have identified the strange inverse relationship between smoking and Parkinson's disease. Long-term smokers are somehow protected against Parkinson's, and it's not because smokers die of other things before. [10 easy roads to self-destruction]

The most recent and well-conducted study was published in a March 2010 issue of the journal Neurology. Far from determining the cause of the protective effect, these researchers found that the number of years spent smoking, rather than the number of cigarettes smoked daily, was more important for a stronger protective effect.

The Harvard researchers were among the first to provide convincing evidence that smokers were less likely to develop Parkinson's. In a study published in Neurology in March 2007, these researchers found that the protective effect decreases after smokers quit smoking. And they concluded, in their special scientific form, that they had no idea why.

Smoking reduces the risk of obesity

Smoking, and in particular nicotine in tobacco smoke, is an appetite suppressant. This has been known for centuries and dates back to the indigenous cultures of America in the pre-Columbian era. Tobacco companies realized in the 1920s and began attacking women with the appeal that smoking would make them thinner.

A study published in the July 2011 issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior is, in fact, one of many that states that the inevitable weight gain in quitting smoking is a major barrier for people to stop, after The addiction.

The relationship between smoking and controlling weight is complex: nicotine itself acts as a stimulant and as an appetite suppressant; and the act of smoking causes a modification of behavior that forces smokers to eat less. Smoking can also make food less tasty for some smokers, further reducing appetite. As an appetite suppressant, nicotine appears to act in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, at least in mice, as revealed in a study by Yale researchers published in the June 10, 2011 issue of the journal Science.

Smoking reduces the risk of death after some heart attacks

Compared to non-smokers, smokers who have suffered heart attacks seem to have lower death rates and more favorable responses to two types of therapy to remove plaque from their arteries: fibrinolytic therapy, which is basically medication; and angioplasty, which removes the plaque by inserting balloons or endografts into the arteries.

However, there is a trap. The reason why smokers have heart attacks is that the smoke heals the arteries, allowing fat and plaque to accumulate in the first place. So, a theory about why smokers perform better than nonsmokers after such therapies is that they are younger and experience their first heart attack for about 10 year before the non-smoker.

A study published in August 2005 in the American Heart Journal, however, states that age alone is not enough to fully explain the differences in survival and that "the smoker's paradox is alive and well." No alternative theories have been proposed since then.

Smoking helps make clopidogrel, a heart medicine, work better.

A study by Korean researchers in the October 2010 issue of Thrombosis Research is based on the work of Harvard researchers published in 2009 that demonstrates the benefit of smoking at least 10 cigarettes a day. It seems that something in cigarette smoke activates certain proteins called cytochromes, which convert the clo.

Pidogrel in a more active state.

Again, no respectable doctor encourages patients to start smoking to make the most of clopidogrel. But this and the other four "benefits" of smoking reveal how tobacco, perhaps not very different from other potentially toxic plants, may contain certain chemicals of real therapeutic value.