14 DAY TRIAL // We constantly hear that smoking is bad for your health and we presume that many smokers are quite aware of what it does to their body, because there are countless articles, studies and researches available online precisely on the topic. However, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words so perhaps this is just what you need to drive the message home.
Smoking kills, and it does so slowly and painfully. The website Tabacco Body does a great job at showing you the many ways in which nicotine and all the toxic ingredients from cigarettes affect your health, your looks and your social interactions.
Smoking doesn’t just cause lung cancer or other type of cancers, blood clots or stomach problems: it also makes you look older, have skin problems, bad breath, be more stressed out and more irritable, experience fertility and weight issues.
Because, as noted above, there is no better way to do justice to the many ways in which smoking is bad for you, Tabacco Body presents you with the picture of a man, while offering you the option to choose on which part of the body / negative effect you want to focus on.
And you have quite an impressive list to choose from: acne, blood vessels, breath odor, face, genitalia, hair, lung cancer, lungs, mouth, nails, sperm, stomach and wrinkles. As you click one, the image zooms in on that part of the body and, on one side you see what happens in a smoker’s body, while the other shows you the body of a non-smoker.
If you’re not convinced still, you also get text. For instance, we learn that, “The smoker’s skin looks unhealthy, because the chemicals in cigarette smoke make the skin’s elastic fibers snap more easily. This causes the skin to lose its elasticity. A weary face is not a popular one: out of 100 most popular profile pictures in a dating service, only two were pictures of smokers.”
Oppositely, “The non-smoker’s face looks healthy, because there are no skin-weakening substances circulating in his blood. Not smoking has the same effect as cosmetics: the skin stays healthy and attractive.”
This are the messages that pop up if you click “Face,” and the same goes for the other parts of the body and their obvious purpose is to put images where before there were only words. That is to say, if you knew before in theory that smoking is bad for you, you can now see for yourself that this is really so.
Editor’s note: as a former smoker myself who quit 4 years ago, this website made me breathe a huge sigh of relief. Bullet (closely) dodged. Give it a go, perhaps it will be of some assistance to you in quitting and starting a healthier life. After all, New Year’s is around the corner, so make quitting one of your resolutions.