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Health Priorities #4: Smoking and Alcohol/Drug use

This is a big one, no matter how you cut it.

Tobacco.

Smoking is responsible for a huge amount of disease and death. It's hard to find current numbers on this, but in 1998, smoking was directly resposnible for about 8% of all deaths in South Africa (~20 000 deaths) and smoking numbers haven't diminished since then. For perspective, that's 4000 more than the current official COVID death toll (October 2020).

Smoking puts you at risk for multiple forms of cancer (25X the chance of developing lung cancer...TWENTY. FIVE.), heart disease (2-5X the risk) stroke (2-5X the risk) and various lung problems like COPD, Emphysema and worsening Asthma.

Again, for some perspective, many people worried that processed meat increases your risk of colorectal cancer. If you ate an extra 5pieces of bacon (processed) every single day, your relative risk of getting colorectal cancer would increase by 18%. Now even this is MUCH lower than the 25X increased risk from smoking but it's a RELATIVE risk, meaning your ABSOLUTE risk would rise from 4% in the general population, to 5% for mass bacon eaters.

In short, if you smoke, but are worried about eating red/processed meat, you need to change your priorities quite desperately.

Even smoking in small amounts (~5cigarettes a day) has been shown to increase risk of disease, so there is no moderation here.

Alcohol.

This is a harder shot to swallow if you'll forgive the metaphor.

Almost all of us enjoy a drink now and then, but equally nearly all of us could benefit from cutting back.

Current stats show that even more people die as a result of alcohol than tobacco in South Africa, although the numbers for booze are inflated by alcohol related accidents, and the smoking numbers are much older (lower).

It is well known that drinking has negative effects on nearly every system in the body and that pure alcohol is poison. We are basically "slightly poisoning" ourselves each time we drink.

Added to this, we cannot ignore the fact that alcohol use puts us at higher risk of doing something stupid, recklessly and avoidable accidents. (When drunk it's not so much that we become stupid, but that our level of acceptable risk seems to increase, so we'll know something is stupid, but do it anyway.)

Add to this the fact that alcohol adds to your daily calorie intake and you may be stalling any weight-loss attempts by drinking too much.

Many people try to make a case for moderate alcohol use increasing lifespan, but there is no evidence to suggest that this is anything to do with anything in the alcohol itself, and rather comes from factors such as stress reduction, social interaction etc.

Drug addiction.

Anyone that has been close to an addict knows just how quickly addiction can spiral somebody's life into the ground. It's an absolute no brainer that you should avoid any sort of addiction if at all possible, physical or otherwise.

What to do?

In short, whatever you have to! Find ways to totally quit smoking and decrease your drinking. Most people have the most success by replacing what they are trying to quit with something more meaningful. If you want to get fit, getting to the gym or going for a run will be much easier if you're not hungover. You will make better progress if you aren't smoking etc. Make your fitness a priority and use that as leverage to squash the bad habits.

There are multiple methods out there for quitting smoking and/or alcohol....I think it's worth trying anything and everything until you find what works....your life may literally depend on it!


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