Senior Fitness
What if You Enjoy Smoking?

By Jim Evans

Dear Jim:

I’ve been a smoker most of my life — I’m 76 now — and I’m tired of everyone nagging me to quit. I happen to enjoy smoking, and I’ve already outlived many of my friends who were nonsmokers, so what’s the beef? Everyone is going to die from something, and if cigarettes finally kill me, so be it. So, tell me — why should I quit smoking? — Still Lighting Up in Livermore

Dear Lighting Up:

You’re right, of course — you shouldn’t quit smoking just because it might kill you. After all, almost as many people die from automobile accidents as from smoking each year, and it clearly doesn’t prevent most people from driving.

According to Frank A. Sloan, one of the authors of a new book, “The Smoking Puzzle: Information, Risk Perception, and Choice,” written by researchers at Duke and North Carolina state universities, “older adults’ decisions to quit smoking require personal experience with a serious health event attributable to smoking, like a heart attack or onset of severe emphysema.” It might be a good book for you to read to help you understand the psychology behind your own attitude about smoking.

It seems that the more personal the message, the more likely it is for smokers to quit.

“The notion that smoking kills apparently is not news to most people,” Sloan said. “But information about the impact on quality of life of a smoking-related disease is news and does cause smokers to change their perceptions of the risk associated with smoking.”

In other words, “the message most older smokers hear suggests they still have time to quit smoking and that once they quit, they will become healthy. So mentally, they put off quitting until they are in their 60s or until they experience a serious health event,” said co-author V. Kerry Smith, who directs North Carolina State’s Center for Environmental and Resource Economic Policy.

Apparently you have not experienced a personal health event to cause you to want to quit smoking. What can I say, except that you are very fortunate. My best advice would still be to stop smoking before you do experience a serious personal health setback, because at least it will be your choice.

In the meantime, you might consider how certain personal health symptoms might be impacting your quality of life, such as frequent coughing; heartburn and indigestion; stained teeth; bad breath; smelly clothes; reduced sense of smell; less money for necessities; poor eating habits; less stamina and endurance; heart palpitations; sinus problems — the list goes on.

Smokers are also more than six times more likely to lose their teeth to gum disease, if that gives you any comfort. Lousy odds, if you ask me.

Any of these sound familiar? You might have forgotten how good you felt before experiencing some of these conditions because it has been so long, and you have simply learned how to “live” with them — if you call that living.

But still another good reason to stop smoking — but only if you can be entirely unselfish — is because you might be causing serious health problems for someone else. Secondhand smoke contains more than 4,000 chemical compounds, of which at least 200 have been identified as poisonous and more than 60 are known carcinogens.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 3,000 nonsmokers die of lung cancer every year from secondhand smoke; an estimated 40,000 nonsmokers die of heart attacks induced by exposure to secondhand smoke; and secondhand smoke is responsible for as many as 300,000 respiratory tract infections among children under 18 months every year. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

No one can make you stop smoking, but don’t be so hard on the people who are nagging you to stop. They do it because they care about you. Maybe that’s a good reason to stop — because you care about them?

Jim Evans is a 38-year veteran of the health and fitness industry and a nationally recognized consultant on fitness for seniors. He is also host of the radio talk show “Forever Young” on San Diego’s KCBQ 1170 AM (www.KCBQ.com).