Chemicals in Cigarettes that Should Make You Quit Smoking

What do a lighter, a battery, a sewer system, and your cigarette stick have in common?

Nasty chemical ingredients!

All contain bad chemicals and the difference being one of them is acceptable to put in your mouth and inhale. Well if you have better sense, these substances should scare you enough for you to quit smoking.

It is a wonder that a regular stick of cigarette contains about 600 ingredients which can create up to 4,000 chemicals when you burn it later. Most of these chemicals are not the neighbourhood-friendly type--- the substances found in a typical cigarette are a concoction of poisons designed to kill you slowly. One guilty huff out of peer pressure may be okay, but regularly breathing the same ingredients of jet fuel, industrial solvents, and insecticides, will surely deliver you to the hospital sooner or later.

Maybe you need a little convincing to finally quit smoking. Read on below and find out the effects of some of these nasty compounds you should be better off cleaning or painting with:

Carbon Monoxide – the colorless, odourless gas is produced from car exhausts and burning carbon fuels. It poisons the body by displacing oxygen in the blood and tightly binding to it, resulting to less oxygenation of the tissues of the body.

Radioactive heavy metals – The soil in which tobacco is grown contain heavy metals that can be adsorbed by the leaves. Fertilizers used in the tobacco industry contain radium and its decay products lead-210 and polonium-210. Heavy metals are already bad for the cells of the body; what more if you add radioactivity to the mix? It’s swallowing X-rays.

Formaldehyde – this industrial chemical is present in many households as glues, adhesives, and cleaning products. They’re also perfect for preserving corpses in medical schools. Light up a cigarette and you get formaldehyde as a combustion by-product, causing irritation to the eyes, nose and throat of smokers.

Ammonia – addition of ammonia to cigarettes enhances the dissociation of bound nicotine, producing free nicotine that easily vaporizes and more rapidly absorbed by the body. The agent is also used in disinfecting agents and fertilizers.

Nicotine – a derivative of the tobacco plant, Nicotiana tabacum, nicotine has been around for thousands of years. They were mainly used for spiking healing potions but it was also thought to have harmful effects on the body. If you’ve been trying in vain to quit smoking, blame nicotine, the main ingredient that gets people hooked in the first place.