Quitting smoking also pays off for climate protection

2023-05-30 04:00:00

World No Tobacco Day: Local lung specialists warn that even one cigarette a day is extremely harmful to your health.

Quitting smoking pays off above all for your own health, but also for climate protection. The lung specialists of the Society for Pneumology (ÖGP) recently pointed this out on the occasion of World No Tobacco Day on May 31st. Quitting smoking also helps protect the environment from the damage caused by toxic waste from cigarette butts or the use of pesticides and fertilizers when growing tobacco, they stressed.

Abandoning the blue haze could even contribute to improving global food security. Tobacco cultivation is resource-intensive, has destructive effects on ecosystems and often competes with the cultivation of food in the cultivation areas – including child labour, precarious working conditions and food shortages, according to the ÖGP.

In a European comparison, Austria is still a country of smokers. Around one in five people still regularly smokes a cigarette and harms themselves, others and their own wallet: With a pack of cigarettes a day, quitting smoking saves around 2000 euros a year, calculated the ÖGP.

“Quitting smoking simply reduces the risk of a variety of life-threatening and life-shortening diseases: COPD and lung cancer in the first place, but also other cancers such as bladder cancer and the broad field of cardiovascular diseases. Quitting smoking reduces the risk even if you had smoked for many years beforehand,” said doctor Christopher Lambers, emphasizing the health aspect.

“Just one cigarette a day increases the risk of coronary artery disease by 48 percent (men) and 57 percent (women) and the risk of stroke by 25 percent (men) and 31 percent (women),” Lambers warned. Nicotine patches, nicotine gum, sprays or inhalers can be used as a “stop-gap” to avoid the products of combustion, the expert recommended. On the other hand, there is no long-term data on e-cigarettes and the like. The smoke-free telephone [phone], www.rauchfrei.at).