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Each year, on the third Thursday in November, the American Cancer Society sponsors the Great American Smokeout.
This is an annual social engineering event to encourage Americans to stop tobacco smoking. The Great American Smokeout challenges smokers to quit cigarettes for 24 hours with the hopes that this decision will continue forever.
Within minutes of smoking your last cigarette, your body begins to recover:
These are just a few of the health benefits of quitting smoking for good, but there are other benefits, too:
Quitting smoking lowers your risk of other cancers over time as well, including cancers of the stomach, pancreas, liver, cervix, and colon and rectum, as well as acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
Quitting also lowers your risk of diabetes, helps your blood vessels work better, and helps your heart and lungs.
Quitting smoking can also add as much as 10 years to your life, compared to if you continued to smoke. Quitting while you're younger can reduce your health risks more (for example, quitting before the age of 40 reduces the risk of dying from smoking-related disease by about 90%), but quitting at any age can give back years of life that would be lost by continuing to smoke.
On average, the cost of a pack of cigarettes in the United States is $8.00. If you smoke a pack a day, or about 15 cigarettes, you could be saving about $183 per month or $2,190 on packs of cigarettes a year if you quit. That’s a lot of dough!
Health insurance premiums are higher for smokers. One estimate predicts that male smokers spend approximately $19,500 more in health costs in their lifetimes (compared to nonsmokers), while women pay about $23,000 more.
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