People may age faster if their dad smoked during puberty
ersnet.org
ersnet.org
My hunch is many people smoke because of stress, same stress from socioeconomic situation may age someone outta stress?
Now if you adopt a kid from such family into low stress enviornment and they still age, now that's better link.
As a side effect it really does a number on the addiction of adults, too!
My dad however probably has been smoking since he was 18 so I don't know what good that does me besides the second hand smoke I had to endure.
Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies.
Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...
As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.
All forms of tobacco are inherently addictive due to the presence of naturally occurring nicotine, which is the main driver of addiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_%26_Williamson#Controver...
So sure, tobacco is still addictive, but as I said in my comment, my main issue is with the hacking/maximization of this by corporations. Especially when that hacking involves adding even more poisonous chemicals.
- No dark patterns that make difficult to unsubscribe or that add automatically products to the basket - No promotion of hate and other highly emotional and highly addictive content - Limit the amount of daily ads so increasing retention time is not a goal - Removal of loot boxes and other gambling from games
and other things like that. Medicines are dangerous and have a lot of regulations, nobody is asking to remove all medical products. That is a straw man argument.
Applying the same type of legislation to social media apps (for children, at least) seems reasonable to me.
Such legislation sounds hard to draw up.
Here is the US Health Secretary talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar...
I think it's the hard work arounds that will eventually break it. Like we're already growing strawberries that are naturally sweet, in the future maybe our bread will be made of wheat that has "natural" sugars in it or something. But I feel that for that to happen the "no added sugars" labeling would have to be exceptionally effective.
What if you add it to a soft drink? Or a ready meal? What about using it instead of fruit in a ready meal?
Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.
For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
Your approach strikes me as the sort of dietary absolutism that is actively damaging to public health.
The salt thing is a case in point. Perhaps it's theoretically true that we could all learn to enjoy our food with less salt. But this would be very hard, and I'm not convinced that an ordinary amount of salt is very damaging to health (except in the case of some specific health conditions that most people don't have).
But many schools in the UK take your approach: kids get taught to cook meals with no added salt (and also the bare minimum of fat). Everything they make therefore tastes bland and tedious.
The result? These kids don't learn to love cooking or home-cooked food. Instead, they learn that the way you eat food that tastes good is to order it from restaurants and fast food outlets. This is much more expensive and much less healthy than cooking at home using a reasonable amount of salt and fat, and it's a public health disaster.
Over-salting is one of the causes of the most common way of dying. I couldn't say for sure because I don't go to restaurants a lot anymore, but it's not rare to see people salting their dishes without even tasting them beforehand.
Sugar and salt are inexpensive ingredients that make highly processed foods more appealing, often leading to over-consumption. This not only displaces more nutritious options but also contributes to their negative reputation and, over time, they have come to be seen as unhealthy in any amount. Sugar, in particular, is sometimes portrayed almost as a poison.
Salt was extremely valuable and thought after before it was broadly available. People always liked salt because it makes things taste better. The amount is a matter of habit and too much salt is unhealthy, but the general principle stands: a little salt is and always was tasty and healthy.
Sure it makes everything tastier, but salt added to every dish is a danger to your health. Where I live you would get almost all your daily recommended intake by your usual portion of bread.
So, yes, salting your lunch or dinner will result in excess salt.
Drinking two liters of coke or two liters of orange juice will equally hurt you.
I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose.
It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more.
It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.
Cravings come back when I'm under stress but it's fine. I know I will just stop again the same way I did before. It's made the whole thing guilt free for me which strangely makes cravings much more manageable than when I was beating myself trying to not restart.
The plan if I failed was to use nicotine patches of decreasing potency. I think you can get those in a sort of kit but I haven't actually found the kit as a product. Anyway the plan now is to just keep it up. I'll avoid alcohol for a while as it makes it more difficult.
It is delicious, a real delight. I'd happily become an addict if I could get a reliable reasonably-priced pharmaceutical-quality supply; but of course you can't, bloody puritans.
It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.
In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Not arguing, just curious.
Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.
Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising.
The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?
You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.
There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.
Why do we need to ban them? If people want to smoke them, let them. The tax can take care of externalities.
(And I say that as someone who hates smoking.)
Alcohol appears to be going in the same direction.
Honestly, I dislike smoking as much as anyone else but I frankly oppose the way Australia is taxing cigarettes and alcohol. These are sin taxes. They are high to deter people from doing things they want to do. That's overreach.
Taxes should aim to cover externalities. That's fair. Your choice forces a burden on the collectivity which it's trying to recoup. Above that, that's just coercion and paternalism. Plus it disproportionally affects the poor but I guess the moral police pushing for this kind of taxes sees that as a benefit.
The taxation level that maximizes revenue or minimizes harmful noncompliance never satisfies the moralizing people who wanted the thing you're discussing (whatever it is) punitively taxed in the first place.
Even if you have the most addictive substance on the planet, the black market puts an upper bound on how much you can tax it.
Externalities also depend on context. Eg your example of cheaper healthcare only works when healthcare is priced by pooling payments. If you have a system where an actuary looks at each case individually (well, a system designed by an actuary does) and assigns a premium, then it doesn't matter what other people are doing: you are paying for your own risk (and competition between insurance providers keeps the system honest).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_indemnity_insurance for a corner of that insurance market that works on the latter system.
Even if you insist on pooling, you could pool smokers and non-smokers separately.
Granted in many places regulations force health insurance providers to do the naive pooling where your statement can be true. Similar, or even more so, for pensions.
First, just because it's hard to disentangle correlation and causation, doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and just assume causation into existence.
Second, your objection would equally wreck a study that just looks at correlation only.
Third, presumably quantity matters, even if everybody is getting at least some secondhand smoke, that doesn't mean everyone is getting the same amount. The study found a way to measure this: they are looking at parental smoking, which presumably is connected with higher total amounts of secondhand smoke on average.
The problem with teasing out causation of A leading to B is that you need some mechanism that cuts of the possibilities of B causing A, and some third factor C causing both A and B. It's easiest to do that, if you know that A was caused by the coin flip of the researcher that put subjects into either treatment or control group. But there are other clever approaches, like 'natural designs'.
The times were simpler, it’ll be much harder to do a similar study in the future due to the proliferation of new carcinogenic substances in food, drugs, drinks, etc. All in all we are healthier anyway.
Statistics 101: Correlation is not causation.
I get it, this proves nothing, but I have plenty of people in my family who drank daily, chain smoked and lived until they were into their late 80s / 90s.
Leading a healthy lifestyle increases your chances, eating like a pig decreases them.
Looking at the outliers and saying "See?! It's all a lie!" is like looking at a lottery winner and concluding that lottery tickets are a sound investment.
Most of the people I spoke of, drank and smoked a lot, but also active to very active, and exercised regularly even in their 80s. Swimming, walking, playing tennis, yard work, gardening. They all seemed to share these things in common.
Being Obese and sedentary seems to be a dangerous undertaking.
Grandpa gave up cigarettes at age 75 or so. Only made it another ten years.
Could outwork teenage me at age 75.
Until you meet someone who is fit, it's hard imagine how unfit a 30 year old can be.
A few years back I did a back country avalanche safety training course. My instructor was 72 years old, anyway we had to skin up a decent size mountain, and here I was in my 30s, actually struggling at times to keep up with him.
I am definitely above average fitness as I do hikes like that regularly, but I work as a programmer and at the time, was doing less cardio than usual, and of course, siting on my ass a lot, but I was witnessing what a lifetime of being outdoors and hiking up mountains in the snow for an occupation did for this guy. It wasn't just the hiking either, the dude could dig his ass off, he has huge forearms and when we got to the peak, dug pits for 10/15 minutes, zero stopping. Again I struggled to keep up with him. Then when it was all over, we had to ski home, which was about 30-40 minutes of descending and traversing. I was pretty gassed at the bottom, he was ready for a beer.
I know that most people my age would struggle, hard, to even keep up with me on that trip, because I've taken people on smaller hikes and seen what happens.
It was stupidly impressive. He is still going strong to this day, probably at 75 now with a girlfriend in her 50s.
Fit people like that are really hard to come by these days.