April
29
November
11
sunwise
October
6
tobacco myths
THE EFFECTS OF TOBACCO
HEALTH COACH BURKS
Tobacco smoke is enormously harmful to your health. There’s no safe way to smoke. Replacing your cigarette with a cigar, pipe, or hookah won’t help you avoid the health risks associated with tobacco products.
Cigarettes contain about 600 ingredients. When they burn, they generate more than 7,000 chemicals. Many of those chemicals are poisonous and at least 69 of them can cause cancer. Many of the same ingredients are found in cigars and in tobacco used in pipes and hookahs.Cigars have a higher level of carcinogens, toxins, and tar than cigarettes.After a short time, you’re left feeling tired and craving more.Smoking lowers good cholesterol levels and raises blood pressure.Blood clots and weakened blood vessels in the brain increase a smoker’s risk of stroke.
When using a hookah pipe, you’re likely to inhale more smoke than you would from a cigarette. Hookah smoke has many toxic compounds and exposes you to more carbon monoxide than cigarettes do. Hookahs also produce more secondhand smoke.
In the United States, the mortality rate for smokers is three times that of people who never smoked. It’s one of the leading causes of preventable death.
One of the ingredients in tobacco is a mood-altering drug called nicotine. Nicotine reaches your brain in mere seconds. It’s a central nervous system stimulant, so it makes you feel more energized for a little while. As that effect subsides, you feel tired and crave more. Nicotine is habit forming.
Smoking increases risk of macular degeneration, cataracts, and poor eyesight. It can also weaken your sense of taste and sense of smell, so food may become less enjoyable.
Your body has a stress hormone called corticosterone, which lowers the effects of nicotine. If you’re under a lot of stress, you’ll need more nicotine to get the same effect.
Physical withdrawal from smoking can impair your cognitive functioning and make you feel anxious, irritated, and depressed. Withdrawal can also cause headaches and sleep problems.
When you inhale smoke, you’re taking in substances that can damage your lungs. Over time, your lungs lose their ability to filter harmful chemicals. Coughing can’t clear out the toxins sufficiently, so these toxins get trapped in the lungs. Smokers have a higher risk of respiratory infections, colds, and flu.
In a condition called emphysema, the air sacs in your lungs are destroyed. In chronic bronchitis, the lining of the tubes of the lungs becomes inflamed. Over time, smokers are at increased risk of developing these forms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Long-term smokers are also at increased risk of lung cancer.
Withdrawal from tobacco products can cause temporary congestion and respiratory pain as your lungs begin to clear out.
Children whose parents smoke are more prone to coughing, wheezing, and asthma attacks than children whose parents don’t. They also tend to have more ear infections. Children of smokers have higher rates of pneumonia and bronchitis.
September
24
carcinogens
A carcinogen is any substance, radionuclide, or radiation that is an agent directly involved in causing cancer. This may be due to the ability to damage the genome or to the disruption of cellular metabolic processes.
Cancer is caused by changes in a cell’s DNA – its genetic “blueprint.” Some of these changes may be inherited from our parents, while others may be caused by outside exposures, which are often referred to as environmental factors. Environmental factors can include a wide range of exposures, such as:
Lifestyle factors (nutrition, tobacco use, physical activity, etc.)Naturally occurring exposures (ultraviolet light, radon gas, infectious agents, etc.)Medical treatments (radiation and medicines including chemotherapy, hormone drugs, drugs that suppress the immune system, etc.)Workplace exposuresHousehold exposuresPollution
Carcinogens do not cause cancer in every case, all the time. Substances labeled as carcinogens may have different levels of cancer-causing potential. Some may cause cancer only after prolonged, high levels of exposure. And for any particular person, the risk of developing cancer depends on many factors, including how they are exposed to a carcinogen, the length and intensity of the exposure, and the person’s genetic makeup.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organization (WHO). Its major goal is to identify causes of cancer. The most widely used system for classifying carcinogens comes from the IARC. In the past 30 years, the IARC has evaluated the cancer-causing potential of more than 900 likely candidates, placing them into one of the following groups:
Group 1: Carcinogenic to humansGroup 2A: Probably carcinogenic to humansGroup 2B: Possibly carcinogenic to humansGroup 3: Unclassifiable as to carcinogenicity in humansGroup 4: Probably not carcinogenic to humans
December
11
linear art design
April
12
BMX
One Passion, One Love, One Dream . . .
It was a regular old Monday, but only this Monday it was my birthday.
I had woke up around 9:00 am. I was so excited it was time to go to the local BMX store. It took awhile to find the right bike, but finally I had found the bike I wanted! it was a “Next” bike, it was red,white, black and a little bit of gray. I knew it was the bike I wanted, when we got home, I got on,and my feet didn’t touch the ground, but “I didn’t let the little things in life slow me down”.
But that didn’t matter I may have been short but that didn’t stop me. As I grew older I got taller the more I rode the better I got going faster and faster before I knew it, I was flying steep hills pedalling as fast as could.
But now today its an old bike that has a rusty chain barely good enough brakes seats been chewed up by dogs but still goes fast this bike means alot to me one reason is because my uncle use to BMX the second reason is because my mom & dad got me this bike. Bike riding is my way of getting away from every day life it helps me when I have a rush of adrenaline.
February
26
pep talk
February
26
minecraft
February
22
minecraft
February
15