
© Getty ImagesGlamourising: Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's made cigarette holders stylish.
IntroductionI was looking YouTube and noticed in one of the comments that I was accused of advocating smoking as a "healthy food". It was nonsense, of course, but it set me wondering where the writer of the comment had got the idea from.
It turned out that it was from an article I have on this website
about diesel smoke being worse than cigarette smoke, written by the late Dr Kitty Little in 1999.
Anyway, it got me looking at the evidence for and against smoking and heart disease again. And caused my to write the following article - because the issue is not as clear as it might appear.
The smoking debateSmoking, particularly cigarette smoking, was first indicted as a cause of lung cancer in the 1950s. Subsequently, it was blamed for many other diseases including cardiovascular disease. But, while there are certainly many papers in the medical literature which attest to smoking as a causal factor in these diseases, there are also a worrying number which refute them.
In the history of heart disease, stopping smoking has been recommended consistently for over half a century, along with lowering cholesterol, dietary changes and exercise to prevent the disease; the four have gone together. Falling incidences of CHD in various countries during the middle of the last century are regarded as a result of national policies on reduction in smoking as well as dietare changes. However, graphs of the rise of heart disease in various age groups in the USA and its subsequent fall from 1900 to 1978, together with trends in smoking over the period, plotted by Stallones in 1980, showed a complete lack of evidence that they are linked.
1
Comment: They claim to be worried about the children, but what they don't understand is that asthma levels have gone up AS A RESULT OF the introduction of smoking bans:
The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking