I’m not supposed to give you any official health advice. I’m just a student nurse, so better get official advice elsewhere. But I think I can safely say this, an overwhelmingly obvious truth: Smoking cigarettes is bad for your health.

If you’ve never smoked, don’t start. If you smoke and can quit, quit. If you smoke and can’t or don’t want to quit, keep your smoking to yourself, away from children, particularly.

There you have it: I do not advocate smoking.

But I do advocate, and would argue passionately for, your right to do so in peace.



MY HUSBAND smokes cigarettes, about 10 a day. Right on our front porch, even. Gasp, I know.

He puts a three-inch, rolled-up paper filled with treated tobacco to his lips and lights the end of it. As the combustion reaction commences, he sucks in its products — some say up to 4,000 chemicals in these smoke emissions — and holds them in his lungs briefly before blowing air back out.

Most times, smoking makes him feel good. If he’s edgy, the nicotine or one of those other myriad chemicals calms him down. If he’s groggy, the cigarette seems to clear his brain.

Are you sickened? Does that gross you out?

Well. Let me get grosser.

Popular, floating-around-Facebook post: a list of what happens to a body when it drinks a can of regular soda pop. I looked it up:

First, more sugar than most anyone needs in an entire day hits your system. The only reason you don’t throw up, says one site, is courtesy of the phosphoric acid in the soda, which cuts the sweet flavor. Oh, but that phosphoric acid steals your calcium, too, the calcium you need for teeth and bones.

The sugar spike from the soda leverages a major insulin response, and as your blood glucose goes berserk, your body strains to store all that that sugar as fat.

But you feel good, thanks to the release of Dopamine.

After about an hour, you crash, but the addictive substances released through that whole process make you want to do it again.



CLEARLY, THERE’S MUCH MORE to say. Cigarette smoke is said to have some 50 carcinogens among those 4,000 chemicals. If that’s true, my husband invites tiny cancer-causers in to invade precious processes and cells every time he lights up. His lungs likely are a frightening shade of gray, too.

The “diabesity” — I did not coin that phrase but read it somewhere; it’s genius! — caused by massive overages of sugar like that in soda offers up a stellar selection of health problems ranging from strokes to osteoporosis to needing kidney dialysis.

It seems, then, that neither cigarette smoking nor sodas are good for us. Though they provide some short-terms pleasures — They do! — they all but guarantee long-term troubles.

Further, smoking can not only affect you, but those around you. The World Health Organization estimates some 600,000 people die every year the world over — many of them children age 5 and younger — from exposure to secondhand smoke (http://www.who.int/tobacco/en/).

That’s a lot of people, and I understand the argument about second-hand smoke. We have a very stringent “no smoking in the house” standard, and my children rarely are exposed at all.

Cigarettes are different than soda pop in this way for sure.

BUT REALLY? Cigarette smoke is public enemy number one? This particular public-health bandwagon — really a steamroller by now — has gone rogue.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court ruling that it is NOT OK for the federal government to insist tobacco companies include graphic pictures of diseased lungs or corpses with surgical staples on their chests on cigarette packaging.

Thank heavens for reason. What a hypocrisy to even suggest it!

If you want to put awful images of corpses with chest scars on cigarette boxes, then you should be all for images of morbidly obese bellies on Coke cans, right? Or clogged arteries on French-fry wrappers?

I am weary of the demonization of cigarettes and smokers. Every “top 10 health problems in the U.S.” list you look up notes heart disease and obesity as the nation’s top concerns. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2010 preliminary data, heart disease and unclarified cancers are still the top two causes of death in the U.S. Diabetes mellitus is number seven. (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_04.pdf)



Yet sports venues are sponsored by soda companies; fast-food restaurants offer $1 any-size drinks; soda “addictions” are comedic and enabled by the big — and bigger — jugs stores pass off as drink cups. But cigarettes are demonized on billboards; taxes on them are compounded; tobacco companies are labeled criminals and smokers banished to outside, off campus, off grounds.

And the moralists amaze me with their flat-out hypocrisy. I mean I’ve heard it several times: “You should just remind your husband that his body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.” Then the “tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk” and head shake.

Wait, I mean JOWL shake. More than one of these so-valued admonitions has come from a pious one who, most likely, is in the “diabesity” camp. You’re telling me about my wicked and sinful husband as you slobber over your burgers, fries and ice cream? Wow.

Setting aside the “secondhand smoke” issue — I do think no one should have to endure smoke exposure if he or she doesn’t want to, and children should not have to endure it at all — I would argue for people’s right to choose what they do as long as they are rightly educated about the benefits, risks and alternatives and accept the responsibility for the outcome.

If you want to smoke, fine. Drink soda, fine. Buy and drink raw milk, fine. Take meds or don’t. Have surgery or don’t. Get an epidural or don’t.

Those are all decisions up to the individual. I do understand there’s a massive additional issue: Who pays for these choices? We can get to that question eventually, but the answer must be built on a foundation that says individuals have both a right to and a responsibility for their health choices.

Honor people’s rights to choose, even the smokers’: That would be my unofficial health advice for the day.



Stephanie Price is a wife, mother, teacher, childbirth educator, midwife’s assistant and nursing student from Elkhart. Contact her at wholefamily@goshennews.com, 269-641-7249 or on Facebook at the page “Whole Family Column by Steph Price.”