Tag Archives: smoking kills

Stop smoking – get tips from experts in online TV chat

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London: Smoking kills. That is a fact. It also stinks, ruins your teeth and pollutes the air for your friends and children – potentially making them ill too. If you want to stop – you can get free help from experts.

Log on to our live and interactive webTV show tomorrow, Friday, October 16 at 3pm by clicking on this link Stop Smoking WebTV Show.

Before the show you can get involved by submit your own top tips (click on the link above to leave your questions and tips) – if they worked for you, chances are they might also work for someone else

Featuring on the show for is Professor Gerard Hastings (pictured), the Director of the Institute for Social Marketing and the Cancer Research UK Centre for Tobacco Control Research. He’ll be joined by Alison Walsh (pictured) the Director of Health and Equality for QUIT, an independent charity whose aim is to save lives by helping smokers to stop.


Pretending to smoke a pencil instead of a cigarette, using a toothpick to keep hands occupied or substituting your fag fix for fun in the bedroom… Silly as they might sound, these are just some of the tried-and-tested methods that have proved successful for real-life quitters.

In England alone, over 80,000 deaths per year are due to smoking, a significant portion of the nation’s 8.5 million smokers. Over the past few month people across Europe have been sharing their real-life quit tips online for the European Union’s “HELP” campaign, and now our live and interactive Web TV show will be revealing the best tips. So if you’re one of the 69% of smokers trying to give up the habit, or know a close friend or family member who is trying to quit, make sure you tune in.

DON’T LET THE GRIM REAPER GET YOU!

Speak to Gerard Hastings and Alison Walsh jlive online at Quit Smoking TV chat on Friday 16th October at 3.00pm to discuss the top tips to quitting smoking

For more information visit www.help-eu.com

Female smokers cut years off life

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Smoking shortens women’s lives by up to seven years, according to new research in the UK.

It also reveals for the first time that smokers have around twice the risk of dying at any age compared with non-smokers.

And smoking is closing the gap between men and women’s life expectancy – cutting the longenjoyed advantage for women.

The grim toll taken by tobacco on the nation’s health is revealed in authoritative research from the Actuarial Profession.

Based on life insurance data covering millions of Britons, the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) shows that a 30-year-old male smoker can expect to survive 5.5 years less, reaching the age of 76.8, compared with over 82 for a non-smoker.

The outlook for young women smokers is worse – they can expect to have their lives shortened by 6.8 years, reaching 79 rather than 86 years.

The predictions come from four years of data on two-and-a-half million policyholders, of whom half a million smoked. There were 20,000 deaths, including 8,500 smokers. The findings could push insurance premiums higher still for smokers and will increase pressure for workplace tobacco bans.

Brian Ridsdale, chairman of the CMI, said: ‘These important new statistics provide further evidence – if it is needed – that smoking is not only bad for the quality of our lives but their quantity too.’

Deputy chairman, Professor Angus Macdonald, of Heriot-Watt University, said: ‘The historic difference between men and women is being overtaken by smoking. A reduction of more than six years is very significant.’ Since the mid-1980s life insurance proposal forms have asked applicants whether or not they smoke, meaning they are more reliable than information from death certificates which do not record smoking habits.

Mr Ridsdale said the new data probably underestimated the cut in life expectancy from smoking, because the non-smokers category included past smokers. Furthermore, the effects of passive smoking were not recorded.

The CMI data also assesses the chances of dying in any year for smokers and non-smokers.

It found a male smoker has a eight in 10,000 chance of dying at the age of 30 – double that of a non-smoker the same age. The risk continues to be twice as high at the age of 40 (12 versus 7), 50 (33 versus 16) and 60 (106 versus 48).

Women who smoke at the age of 30 have a four in 10,000 chance of dying, compared with a three in 10,000 chance for a non- smoker. The risk rises steadily, more than doubling by the age of 60 to 85 in 10,000 compared with 35 in 10,000 for a non-smoker.

Jean King, Cancer Research UK’s director of tobacco control, said: ‘These statistics are shocking but not surprising. Smoking significantly reduces life expectancy and kills many thousands of people in middle age every year.’