BREATH TAKING
WE ALL know how terrible smoking is for our health.
But for many of the us, the harm cigarettes cause remains a theoretical concept unless we start to actually experience side effects.
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But now a horrifying new video making the rounds on social media is giving a peek into what your lungs look like in real-time, if you smoke.
The clip - posted to the Instagram account @businessgrowthmentor - first shows a set of blackened, limp lungs hooked up to an air pump.
They're meant to represent the lungs of a habitual smoker, and it appears the organs are real.
When a puff of air is blown into the smoker's lung, only a small portion of them swells up - and it does so slowly.
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The healthy, pink lung shown right afterwards puffs up to twice that size, by contrast.
The caption stated: "Smoking can cause a variety of lung problems, such as chronic bronchitis, emphysema, and decreased lung function.
"These changes can lead to reduced oxygen intake, increased susceptibility to infections, and increased risk of lung cancer."
This isn't the first video exposing the harsh reality of what smoking does to our lungs.
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The American Lung Association recently put together a demonstration to show how smoking wreaks havoc on lung health by comparing the lungs of a healthy nonsmoker versus those of a smoker.
Freedom From Smoking trainder Jennifer Hobbs Folkenroth explained that lungs have two sides.
The right side is larger and contains three lobes, while the smaller left side has only two.
Healthy lungs should be pink-coloured, she went on, showing the lungs of a 'very healthy non-smoker'.
Inflating the the healthy lung to show how it took in air, Jennifer said: "When you breathe, you have millions of little air sacs in the lung called alveoli [which] fill up with vital oxygen to carry it through the bloodstream, throughout the body, and deliver it to your various organs."
She then showed a smoker's lung, which was blackened due to the tar produced by smoking cigarettes.
Jennifer said a "full cup of tar is filtered through your lungs" if you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day for a year.
She showed how the lower portion of the smoker's right lung failed to inflate when air was pumped into it.
"It has completely been shut off due to the damage from all of the tar as well as over 7,000 chemicals and toxic poisons from cigarette smoke," Jennifer explained.
Doing every day activities like walking from your car to the supermarket or going up a flight of stairs is much more strenuous and challenging with the smoker's lung, Jennifer went on.
She also showed how the left lung was abnormally large, to make up for the lack of capacity in the right one.
On top that, the lung specialist pointed out a tumour on the right lung.
"In more than 87 per cent of cases, by the time lung cancer is diagnosed it's already spread throughout the body," she warned.
She also showed how air sacs in the smoker's lung had burst open, creating little porous holes.
"With each puff you take out of a cigarette, you pop those air sacs," Jennifer said.
This is called emphysema and it's the only tobacco related illness that's not reversible, she stated.
But Jennifer said all the other damage caused to the lungs is reversible after you quit.
You can clean out the tar and improve your lung function by up to 30 per cent in the first few weeks, the lung specialist said, adding: "It's never too late to quit."
According to the NHS, smoking is one of the biggest causes of death and illness in the UK, killing around 76,000 Brits yearly.
It can increase your risk of up to 12 different cancers, as well as making you more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke and heart disease.
Tips to stop smoking
With Stoptober in full swing, there are thousands of Brits committing to giving up smoking - it's not too late to join them.
The first thing you need to do is throw away all your cigarettes - there's no such thing as 'just one cigarette' .
The NHS recommends you:
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- List your reasons to quit
- Tell people you're quitting
- If you have tried to quit before, remember what worked
- Use stop smoking aids like nicotine patches, sprays, gum and lozenges or nicotine vapes - ask a pharmacist for advice
- Have a plan if you are tempted to smoke
- List your smoking triggers and how to avoid them
- Keep cravings at bay by keeping busy
- Exercise away the urge
- Get support - find your local Stop Smoking Service, enlist the help of friends or join a Facebook Group
You can also get a free 'personal quit plan' just by answering three questions.