Which smoke will kill you?
According to a load of research, smoking just one cigarette a day does almost half the damage of smoking a whole pack.
They expected the health risk of one cigarette to be five percent of the risk of smoking 20 (one divided by 20; this is true for lung cancer risk). But they found that men who lit up just one cigarette a day had 46 percent of the increased heart disease risk and 41 percent of the excess stroke risk associated with smoking a pack a day. For women, smoking one cigarette a day accounted for 31 percent of the heart disease risk and 34 percent of the stroke risk of smoking 20.
It’s not the cigarettes that’ll kill you – it’s the 80/20 rule!
Three things about this for our work:
– What are the things that we aim to cut down on that are killing us? Is it possible to cut them out all together?
– What activities are the opposite of these cigarettes – where it only takes a little to have a big positive impact on you and your colleagues?
– Back to air pollution. Breathing Jakarta’s air at the moment is something like smoking 1/6 of a cigarette a day (see Richard St Cyr’s excellent blog), which doesn’t sound too bad… Until realise that what we’re breathing is probably way more toxic than tabacco smoke. And that smoking the first cigarette takes you half way to twenty. #udarakita