Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Top 5 reasons teens should not start smoking

According to the American Cancer Society, most smokers start as teens. While the numbers of teenage smokers have been slowly declining in the past 10 years, roughly 23 percent of teenagers continue to smoke, despite aggressive messaging from anti-smoking campaigns.

According to Dr. Robert Pendergrast, a pediatrician with the Medical College of Georgia Children’s Medical Center, “Teens want to look cool and that image continues to be tied in with smoking. As a doctor, and not the police or a parent, my job is to do everything in my power to help these kids kick the habit. But the best solution by far is to never pick up that first cigarette.”

In recognition of last week’s Great American Smokeout, Dr. Pendergrast offers the following top five reasons why teens should not start smoking:

• Smoking gives you yellow teeth, stained fingernails and that funny smell on your clothes, in your car, everywhere. “This is the top reason in my book,” said Dr. Pendergrast. “Want to look cool? The stains and odor from cigarette smoking aren’t cool at all.”

• Imagine a 5 oz. jam jar filled with tar. Now imagine your lungs filled with that same amount of tar. “If you smoke for one year, that’s the amount of tar your lungs will have processed,” said Dr. Pendergrast.

• If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, over the course of a year, you would have spent enough money to buy 79 CDs, a state-of-the-art DVD-recorder plus a flat-screen TV, 22 single-day passes to Disneyworld or season tickets to the Seattle Supersonics. “At roughly $3.25 a pack, cigarettes would cost you $1,186.25 over the course of one year,” said Dr. Pendergrast. “There are better things to spend your money on, things that don’t harm your health.”

• Once you start, it’s very, very hard to quit. “There’s a reason why there are so many anti-smoking products, seminars and books out there — it’s not easy to find one single solution for quitting,” said Dr. Pendergrast. “It takes most people several tries before they can quit — and in most cases, they still live with the cravings everyday. Every smoker I’ve worked with has said they wished they never started.”

• Smoking kills — slowly but surely. “Once you take that first puff, the damage to your lungs begins. Would you knowingly ingest poison? Then don't smoke,” said Dr. Pendergrast.

MCG Health System is composed of three separate organizations — MCG Health, Inc. and the clinical services offered by the faculty employees of the Medical College of Georgia and the members of the Physicians Practice Group. The physicians of MCG Health System are community physicians and faculty employees of the Medical College of Georgia and the Physicians Practice Group, not employees of MCG Health Inc. MCG Health, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation operating the MCG Medical Center, MCG Children’s Medical Center, the MCG Sports Medicine Center, MCG Ambulatory Care Center, the Georgia Radiation Therapy Center and related clinical facilities and services. MCG Health, Inc. was formed to support the research and education mission of the Medical College of Georgia and to build the economic growth of the CSRA, the state of Georgia and the Southeast by providing an environment for faculty employees of the Medical College of Georgia and the Physicians Practice Group and community physicians to deliver the highest level of primary and specialty health care. For more information, visit www.MCGHealth.org.