Most people would never think to connect smoking and diabetes, as they’d never imagine that two completely unrelated problems would have a connection. After all, smoking affects your lungs, while diabetes is a disorder that has to do with your blood sugar. How are the two connected?
As with anything else in your body, everything is connected! If you affect one system, you affect all of the others to a certain degree. Smoking and diabetes may not be directly linked, but diabetics should be careful with their health – and smoking certainly doesn’t count as taking care of your body!
Smoking and Diabetes: A Look at the Facts
Did you know that something like 45 million American adults smoke – meaning that about 20% of people in the country can be seen walking around with a cigarette in their mouths. Smoking is believed to kill as many as 500,000 people, or at least contribute to their deaths in some way. It is the #1 cause of premature, avoidable deaths in our beautiful country. Smoking, in short, is going to kill you one way or another.
Diabetes is a disorder that affects just over 8% of the population of the United States – meaning almost 26 million people in the country have this problem. Smoking is actually linked to the development of Type 2 Diabetes, the type that you develop rather than being born with. A study done in Switzerland showed that smoking raises your chances of developing diabetes to 44%, while doctors believe that smoking more than one pack per day will raise your chance of diabetes up to 61% – a pretty high number! It is estimated by the AHA that around 22% of people with diabetes also smoke, and those that do smoke are much more likely to develop serious health problems as a result of their smoking and diabetes.
Smoking and Diabetes: What Happens?
If you already have diabetes, smoking is just going to make it worse. If you have a problem with both smoking and diabetes:
Your Cholesterol Levels Become Imbalanced — Smoking raises the levels of bad LDL cholesterol, the stuff that sticks to the walls of your arteries and causes blockages that can lead to heart attacks and strokes. It will also reduce the levels of good HDL cholesterol, which are responsible for getting rid of the bad cholesterol. Already, diabetes is going to be causing a number of problems – specifically problems with your cardiovascular system. Adding high cholesterol to smoking and diabetes means that you’re much more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Smoking also weakens the walls of your arteries, so combining smoking and diabetes is akin to swallowing a time bomb.
Your Body is More Likely to Be Damaged – If you combine smoking and diabetes, don’t be surprised when you suffer from nerve damage (neuropathy), damage to your eyes (retinopathy), or kidney damage (nephropathy). These are the three things that are most at risk if you have diabetes, and adding smoking to the list will just increase the risk of your body being damaged.
Your Blood Pressure Rises – Already, the high levels of insulin in your bloodstream will be causing a number of health problems, which is why diabetes is such a hard one to beat. However, combining smoking and diabetes will compound the problem even further, as smoking raises your blood pressure. It causes your heart to have to work harder to pump blood throughout your body, which means your heart is working double time – which can lead to serious damage to the muscles in your heart. With the weakened arterial walls caused by smoking, the increase in blood pressure can actually cause the walls to crack – which causes clots that can lead to strokes, heart attacks, and peripheral arterial disease.
Your Blood Glucose Levels Are Increased – Nicotine is known to promote insulin resistance, which is already a problem if you have diabetes. Diabetes is the result of too much sugar in your blood, and smoking will keep raising the levels of blood sugar until they’ve gone way past a healthy amount. Smoking and diabetes together can worsen your diabetes problems until far beyond what diabetes alone can do.
Your Endocrine System is Affected – It is believed that women are more likely to be affected by smoking and diabetes than men will – though the effect to men won’t be anything to scoff at either. The endocrine system is affected by the smoking, and this hormone-controlling system will react by lowering the levels of estrogen in your body. With lower levels of estrogen, it’s likely that you will go into menopause earlier than you should.
Your Fat Storage Increases – When you smoke, you actually promote the storage of fat by your body. You’ll find that diabetes is already a problem for those that are overweight, but it just gets worse if you add smoking into the mix. Your body will use more of the sugar that it has floating around in your bloodstream, and it will turn it into body fat – exactly what you want to avoid.
As you can see, the mixture of smoking and diabetes is far worse than either of the two problems would be on their own. If you have diabetes, it’s imperative that you avoid smoking – as smoking will just cause things to get out of control. If you smoke, be prepared to develop diabetes – in a few years even if not now.
The truth is that smoking is just a poor health choice, and we’re all about healthy lifestyles here at Healthier Post. You should think about not only your present enjoyment, but also your future health. The choices you make now will affect just how healthy you are in the future, so be wise and quit smoking now – and, for God’s sake, don’t mix smoking and diabetes!