What’s worse? The fact that you’re inhaling hot, smoke into your lungs? Or the fact that you’re inhaling actual cigarette ingredients (nicotine, tar, etc.) into your lungs?

Question

What increases ones chance of getting cancer and other respiratory complications? Is it just smoking anything e.g. normal paper, crack, weed, etc.? Or is it specifically smoking cigarette ingredients? If someone smoked anything else other than cigarettes, as much as cigarette smokers smoke cigarettes, would their likelihood to getting cancer be the same as that of a cigarette smoker?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Cigarettes are worse for your lungs than regular paper, yes. Not that paper is OK to smoke – please don’t smoke paper. But cigarettes are worse.

Your entire airway, from your nostrils down into your lungs, is coated in mucus. That sounds gross, but it’s a good thing! The mucus protects your lungs by acting like flypaper – any particles floating around in the air get stuck to it before they can reach the delicate membranes inside your lungs. Dust, pollen, bacteria, and yes, smoke, all get filtered out by the mucus. Most of it, anyway. If there’s enough smoke, then some still reaches the lungs and damages them. That’s why smoking anything, even just paper, is bad.

Just like changing the filter on an air purifier, the mucus has to be “changed out” frequently. Your body does this with little hairlike structures called *cilia*. The cilia wave back and forth, constantly pushing the mucus (and anything caught in it) to your throat. From there it drops into your stomach to be destroyed, and new mucus is secreted to replace it. Your airway thus has a constant “conveyor belt” of mucus clearing out all the crap that you inhale.

Here’s the “tobacco is worse” part: *nicotine paralyzes the cilia*. So not only are you intentionally inhaling smoke, thereby saturating and using up all your protective mucus, but you’re shutting down the conveyor belt to replace that mucus! Your body can’t clear out your airways anymore, making your lungs much more vulnerable to not only all the smoke you’re inhaling, but anything else that could damage them, too.

If you talk to people who’ve quit smoking, they all tell the story of about two weeks after their last cigarette, they start coughing up this nasty black goo for a few days. That’s the “conveyor belt” starting back up again – their body is finally clearing out the old layer of mucus that’s been sitting there, marinating in cigarette smoke, for years.