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We all know we need to quit smoking .  But now here's a new really good one.  Young male smokers may raise obesity risk in sons they may have in the future. Men who start smoking before the age of 11 risk having sons who are overweight, British researchers have found, adding to evidence that lifestyle factors even in childhood can affect the health of future offspring, writes Kate Kelland at Reuters. "The scientists said the findings, part of ongoing work in a larger 'Children of the 90s' study, could indicate that exposure to tobacco smoke before the start of puberty in men may lead to metabolic changes in the next generation," she reports. Worldwide, almost one billion men smoke - about 35 percent of men in developed countries and 50 percent in developing ones, according to the World Health Organization. While previous studies in animals and in people have found some transgenerational health impacts, the evidence so far is limited. It points, however, to ep...

So you cut back on smoking, went from a pack a day to just two or three, a dozen years ago.  Here's the really bad news.  It won't help you live longer. According to a story by Linda Searling, a new report has found that, while cutting down on the number of cigarettes you smoke is better than staying at the same level, or increasing it, in the end it's not going to add to your longevity. Over 5,200 smokers -- ages 40 to 65, at the start -- participated in the study.  Over the next 30 years, of the people who continued to smoke, a shocking 84 percent died, Searling reports. If they quit smoking altogether, however, those in the study were more likely to live to at least age 75. Searling adds in the story that they also "were 25 to 35 percent less likely than the others to have died." But, and here's the truly scary part, "There was essentially no difference in the mortality rate for people who had reduced the number of cigarettes ...

We knew it all along.  Ads do lead people to do things and now a new study has proved that cigarette ads do, indeed, lead teens to smoke. Movies feature fewer people smoking these days than in the past, and while you still don't see an actor walk into a party or restaurant and the first thing they do is light up a cigarette, but the cigarettes are still there, and they're still considered cool. My own mom began smoking when she was 11 (and this was back in the 1930s) because her best friend did, and while my mom was able to quit in her 70s, her friend went on smoking -- and hacking, even through emphysema -- until she died in her mid-80's. I was lucky.  The smell of smoke always filled our house and I couldn't stand it, or the sight of all those ashtrays (though my mom was a clean smoker, and emptied them almost as quickly as they were filled).  As a result, I've chosen never to smoke and am probably the only living person the planet who has never held a ci...

No, you're not imagining it.  And it's not just age. If you're around smokers, that memory loss that's been terrifying you may very well be attributable to being around smokers, according to Fox News, while the Mail Online in the UK notes that the same study found that non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke forgot 20% more than non-smokers who were not exposed. But before you panic, those studied "reported being exposed to second-hand smoke for an average of 25 hours a week for an average of four and a half years."  They included people who lived with smokers or spent a lot of time in designated smoking areas (euw).   http://radio.foxnews.com/2012/09/23/housecall-for-health-second-hand-smoke-memory-loss/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2202636/Non-smokers-regularly-exposed-second-hand-smoke-risk-damaging-memory.html#axzz2Kbc0SHYx