Is Smoking Cigarettes All that Bad?

Yes I believe it is. That doesn’t mean there are not worse things for you.

About a year ago, my family took a vacation to Italy. It was wonderful as you can imagine. The people were warm and friendly.

Something I noticed, however, was that a lot of them smoked cigarettes. So I became curious. I looked up smoking rates in Italy vs the United States.

I was right. 24.2% of adults in Italy currently smoke cigarettes. 11.6% of adults in the United States do. Personally I was surprised at the 11.6% statistic. I thought it would be much lower in the US.

Then I looked up lung cancer rates. According to Google AI, lung cancer rates in Italy are lower than the United States. Corrected for population of course.

Weird. You’d think with twice the rate of smokers, Italy would have more lung cancer.

Something else I noticed on my vacation. Most Italians were thin. They seemed in pretty good shape. The vast majority of overweight people I saw in Italy were tourists. Or at least people who spoke English with an American accent.

So I looked into obesity and lung cancer. Maybe that would explain it. Turns out obesity can be a risk factor for lung cancer. Curiously obese people have better survival rates if they contract lung cancer. Scientists call this phenomenon the ‘obesity paradox’.

That’s not a great reason to become obese.

Besides lung cancer, obesity contributes to all sorts of other cancers:

• Meningioma

• Adenocarcinoma

• Multiple myeloma

• Kidney cancer

• Uterine cancer

• Ovarian cancer

• Thyroid cancer

• Breast cancer

• Liver cancer

• Gallbladder cancer

• Upper stomach cancer

• Pancreatic cancer

• Colon and rectal cancer

In many cases, obesity and insulin resistance generally also makes people less successful with treatment for these cancers.

I had put this Googling to bed about a month after I returned from Italy. But then about a week ago I was talking to a doctor friend about diets in my assisted living homes. He brought up to me that there were studies showing smoking had better health outcomes than diabetes.

Back to Doctor Google. Sure enough, I found a study that showed during the Covid pandemic that smoking was less risky than diabetes when it came to Covid mortality. In fact most of the smokers had mild symptoms compared to the severe outcomes of Covid-infected diabetics in the study.

I couldn’t find a whole lot on mortality risks among smokers vs those with diabetes in general. I did find articles stating that smoking can make diabetes symptoms worse.

The articles generally state that you should do everything you can to stop smoking and it will help your diabetes. Makes sense.

What the article doesn’t say is anything about what you should do to lessen your risk of diabetes through diet and lifestyle changes.

All this to say that while I’m not a fan of smoking, I’m also not a fan of unhealthy lifestyles in general. That’s why I rant in these newsletters how important it is to get control of insulin resistance. Especially when it can be done at very low cost and in a short period of time.

Thank you for listening to my rants.