Blog

What is in a cigarette, anyway? Well, World No Tobacco Day is May 31, so it might be a good time to find out.

For starters, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to learn that tobacco products are harmful.

According to the American Lung Association, cigarettes contain around 600 ingredients that give off more than 7,000 different chemicals when they’re lit. Many of these chemicals are poisonous, and nearly 70 of them are known carcinogens.

Here is a list (and a diagram below) of some of the poisons found in a cigarette.

• Embalming fluid
• Nail polish remover
• Butane
• Insecticide
• Battery acid
• Rocket fuel
• Exhaust fumes

And that’s just a partial list of what’s in a cigarette … are you ready to try and quit smoking for World No Tobacco Day yet?

Also, here are some of the latest statistics from the American Cancer Society about the effects of smoking and correlation between cigarettes and cancer:

• Tobacco use is directly responsible for about 1 in every 5 deaths in the U.S. That’s about 480,000 early deaths per year. Smoking also causes about 1 in every 30 cancer-related deaths.
• Lung cancer is the top cause of cancer death for both women and men in the U.S.
• Men who smoke are 25 x more likely to develop lung cancer than non-smoking men. For women, that figure goes up to 25.7%.
• Tobacco products increase the risk for a number of other cancers, not just lung cancer, including: stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, bladder cancer, ovarian cancer and leukemia.

So, what’s in a cigarette? The short answer to that could be “Cancer.”

To learn more about the tobacco facts, cancer statistics and tips to quit smoking, click here.

Have you stopped smoking in recent years to help prevent a potential cancer diagnosis? How did you quit? Please share your stories with us in the comments!

(Images via WebMD and Stop Smoking Wales.)