Everybody knows now that smoking is bad for you. But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Americans smoked with reckless abandon in their offices, in department stores, on elevators, planes and buses. In 1965, nearly half of all Americans smoked. The World Health Organization officially took a stance against smoking in the 1970s, and rates have dropped steadily ever since now down to 21 percent source AHA . In today’s society, it would be unthinkable for someone to light up at his or her office desk or in an elevator. Just try it and see what happens.

Cigarette manufacturers were forced to list the ingredients in cigarettes in 1998, so the public is now aware that there are more than 4,000 chemicals in each and every smoke. Here’s a list of the 10 most dangerous

• Ammonia used to increase the absorption rate of nicotine. It’s also used to clean your toilet, helps to treat wastewater (poop and pee) and is a key ingredient in liquid fertilizer.
• Arsenic used as a pesticide on tobacco plants, it remains in the resulting cigarette. If you have a rat problem in your home, you can use arsenic to kill them.
• Cadmium a metallic compound that tobacco collects from acidic soil. Is the battery in your cell phone low? Use cadmium to recharge it!
• Formaldehyde a byproduct of cigarette smoke, this colorless gas is commonly used to preserve dead bodies for burial.
• Acetone another byproduct from burning a cigarette. It’s also found in nail polish remover and, like ammonia, is used to clean toilets.
• Butane this byproduct is also used to help you light your cigarette, in the form of lighter fluid.
• Propylene Glycol added to cigarettes to keep tobacco from drying out. What it really does is speed up the delivery of nicotine to the brain.
• Turpentine used to flavor menthol cigarettes. This oil also can be used to thin paint and strip varnish from wood.
• Benzene another byproduct from burning a cigarette. You can find benzene in pesticides and gasoline.
• Lead and Nickel Yes, these are metals. Need we say more?

So how does your body digest these things? It really doesn’t which is the problem with cigarettes.

What’s in a cigarette

Title Page

Introduction

Unit 1

Unit 2

Unit 3

Unit 4
&#149 What’s In a Cigarette & Disease

&#149 Cycle of Addiction

&#149 Other Health Dangers of Cigarettes

&#149 Reading & Writing Activities Vocabulary Through Context Clues

Unit 5

Unit 6

Bibliography

What’s in a Cigarette & Disease Chemicals, Cancer and Heart Disease

The main ingredient in cigarettes is tobacco. Tobacco is a green, leafy plant that is grown in warm climates. Farmers use many chemicals to grow tobacco. They use fertilizers to make the soil rich and insecticides to kill the insects that eat the tobacco plant.

After the tobacco plants are picked, they are dried, and machines break up the leaves into small pieces. Artificial flavorings and other chemicals are added. Some chemicals are put in cigarettes to keep them burning otherwise, they would go out.

There are over 4,000 chemicals in cigarettes. 51 of them are known to be carcinogenic. A carcinogen is something that causes cancer. Cancer is a disease that often kills those who have it. There are many types of cancer breast, lung, larynx, stomach, prostrate, kidney, leukemia (cancer of the blood), etc. In all kinds of cancer, the cells keep dividing and forming new, abnormal cells. These cells are not normal or healthy.

Our bodies are made up of thousands of cells. In a healthy person, new cells are made only when the body needs them. In a person with cancer, the abnormal cells destroy the normal cells, invading them like an army. If cells divide when new cells are not needed, a growth or hard mass forms. It could be small like a pea or large like a grapefruit. A cancerous growth is called a malignant tumor.

Cancer usually kills a person when it spreads to other parts of the body. Sometimes cancer cells break away from a malignant tumor and find their way into the bloodstream. They travel to another part of the body or organ like a kidney or lung. There they start multiplying and dividing and form new cancerous tumors. For example, if a woman who has a malignant tumor in her breast does not have it removed while it is small, part of the tumor might break away and go into her bloodstream. From there it may travel to her brain and give her brain cancer.

Chemicals in cigarettes and cigarette smoke are known to cause not only cancer but also other serious health problems. Many of the chemicals are poisonous. If a person ate one pack of cigarettes, he/she would die.