I never smoked. Oh, I puffed on probably three cigarettes over the course of my life, and in my callow youth I would occasionally light up a cigar. But I was always very leery of getting hooked. This was due in no small part to my dad, who was a smoker until about eight or nine years ago; during my childhood, he told me repeatedly that he didn’t want to smoke, but that he was addicted, and that he wished he’d never started. That left an impression on me, and since I didn’t want all of the health risks of smoking, like lung cancer and heart disease, I figured it was a bad idea to start.<\/p>\n
Alas, not all kids are like me. Some actually start smoking, and some continue to smoke into adulthood. How to scare kids into not smoking is a perennial topic, never mind that we’ve pretty much won that battle<\/a>. Now, Finnish researchers have a new weapon in the war on smoking: shame.<\/p>\n No, not shame of smoking — silly! No, the researchers suggest fat shaming! Because no matter the behavior, it’s always a good idea to threaten that it will make you fat in the end<\/a>:<\/p>\n Telling teenage would-be smokers that lighting up may make them fat down the road may be a more effective deterrent than harping on the risks of heart disease and cancer from smoking, hints research published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, this must be a study of teens’ attitudes about smoking and fat, right? Of course not — the study doesn’t appear to say anything about whether telling teens they’ll gain weight if they smoke is a more effective deterrent than telling teens they’ll die of lung cancer. I suspect that’s because it isn’t a bigger deterrent.<\/p>\n But at least the study shows that there’s a serious weight gain involved, right?<\/p>\n In a study, Finnish researchers found that smoking during adolescence strongly predicted the development of abdominal obesity in adulthood, among both men and women.<\/p>\n In particular, they found that girls who smoked at least 10 cigarettes daily during adolescence had a 3.4-centimeter larger waistline as young adults, on average, than did girls who had never smoked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 3.4 whole centimeters? Shocking! That’s almost one and one-third inches<\/em>! Why, ex-smokers must weigh five or six pounds<\/em> more than non-smokers!<\/p>\n […]<\/p>\n “And most interesting,” said Saarni, the apparent link between smoking during adolescence and being heavy later on was independent of the young person’s own body weight — meaning that those who were heavy smokers had greater waist circumference even within the same body mass index (BMI) levels as their non-smokers peers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oh, crikey, can we just stop now? Guess what — ex-smokers have a tendency to gain some weight. That’s due to a lot of things — nicotine is a mild stimulant, ex-smokers often eat a bit more to replace the behavior of sucking on a cigarette, whatever — but it’s not exactly a news flash. My dad gained some weight when he quit smoking; so what? He also avoided going down the path of my grandpa, who died of lung cancer. I think he made the right choice.<\/p>\n At any rate, ex-smokers tend to be slightly heavier than people who never smoked. Are there health risks involved in this? Or, you know, anything that anyone should be concerned about?<\/p>\n This research, Saarni added, “gives a tool” to highlight the risks of smoking to adolescents and young adults “by showing the unhealthy effect on the body shape.” This can be an important deterrent, “because usually young people find cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes or even cancer so distant risks that they have very little impact on ones smoking behavior.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yeah, because the kid who thinks she’s invulnerable to a heart attack is going to worry that smoking can make her weigh up to ten pounds more than she otherwise would.<\/p>\n I mean, really, is this going to sell? “If you start smoking, you’re at risk for cancer and heart disease, and you’ll die early — oh, and if you quit, you might gain a few pounds.”<\/p>\n That won’t work. What I just did was convince my hypothetical teen smoker never to quit smoking, because, you know, he might gain a few pounds, which is terrible because there is nothing worse than being fat. Because, you know, there just isn’t. It’s enough to make me want to start smoking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I never smoked. Oh, I puffed on probably three cigarettes over the course of my life, and in my callow youth I would occasionally light up a cigar. But I was always very leery of getting hooked. This was due … Continue reading