In general, a light smoker is someone who smokes less than 10 cigarettes per day. Someone who smokes a pack a day or more is a heavy smoker.
Background: Heavy smokers (those who smoke greater than or equal to 25 or more cigarettes a day) are a subgroup who place themselves and others at risk for harmful health consequences and also are those least likely to achieve cessation.
Among daily smokers, the average number of cigarettes smoked per day declined from about 17 cigarettes in 2005 to 14 cigarettes in 2016.
Lung and Other Cancers
For daily smokers (> 20 cig/day), the risk of dying from lung cancer is more than 23 times higher in men and about 13 times higher in women than nonsmokers (1). The risks for light smokers, while lower, are still substantial.
“Smoking as few as five days per month can lead to shortness of breath and coughing. And smoking one to four cigarettes per days can increase your risk of heart disease and cancer." Light smokers also have a higher risk of lung cancer than nonsmokers.
Exercise Regularly
Exercise increases the amount of oxygen that gets delivered to cells and tissues throughout your body. Cardiovascular exercises like brisk walking, swimming, running, and cycling are ideal for helping to clear out your lungs after you quit smoking.
The study showed that male smokers who make it to 70 years old still lose about four years off their life, with projections of 88, 86 and 84 for nonsmokers, former smokers, and current smokers, respectively.
The mutations that lead to lung cancer had been considered to be permanent, and to persist even after quitting. But the surprise findings, published in Nature, show the few cells that escape damage can repair the lungs. The effect has been seen even in patients who had smoked a pack a day for 40 years before giving up.
“And since people start out with millions of alveoli, it can take 15 or 20 years to lose enough of them to really become obvious. But once you develop something like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), there's no going back. Once you get to that point, you're never going to get off the oxygen tank.”
The mystery of why some people are able to smoke heavily without developing a lung condition has been explained by scientists. Mutations in DNA enhance lung function in some people and protect them against the often deadly impact of smoking, according to the Medical Research Council.
1: Vaping is less harmful than smoking, but it's still not safe. E-cigarettes heat nicotine (extracted from tobacco), flavorings and other chemicals to create an aerosol that you inhale. Regular tobacco cigarettes contain 7,000 chemicals, many of which are toxic.
He and his colleagues calculated that the risk from smoking about one cigarette per day is around “half that for people who smoke 20 per day.” The findings challenge a widely held view that smoking just a few cigarettes per day is “relatively safe.”
Every day smoker: An adult who has smoked at least 100 cigarettes in his or her lifetime, and who now smokes every day. Previously called a “regular smoker”. Former smoker: An adult who has smoked at least 100 cigarettes in his or her lifetime but who had quit smoking at the time of interview.
John Everett Koop smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, developing a chronic cough that alarmed his wife. She shared her concerns with her son during one of his visits home from college. Koop agreed with her, but doubted that his father could muster the determination to quit.
No. Even one cigarette a week is bad for your health. Each cigarette you smoke exposes you to nicotine and other harmful chemicals and increases your risk for heart disease and cancer. The negative effects of smoking add up over the course of your life.
It's never too late to get benefits from quitting smoking. Quitting, even in later life, can significantly lower your risk of heart disease, stroke, and cancer over time and reduce your risk of death.
Some damage to your lungs and other organs from smoking may be permanent, but your lungs will eventually heal and recover much of their function after you quit, and the tar built up in your lungs as a result of smoking will go away.
For most people, quitting before the age of 35 enables the body to recover from the harms of smoking, though this can depend on genetic susceptibility to the harms of tobacco smoke. Smoking affects almost every organ in the body, particularly the lungs and heart.
Study finds some individuals have genetic variants that allow them to have long-term exposure to a carcinogen without developing lung cancer.
The world's documented longest-living person, Jeanne Calment, was a smoker for most of her life, and another claimant to the title is said to smoke a pack a day.
Light and intermittent smoking, or social smoking, is better for you than heavy smoking. But it still increases the risks of heart disease, lung cancer, cataract, and a host of other conditions. Quitting smoking completely is the best option for long-term health.
Your lungs are self-cleaning, which means they will gradually heal and regenerate on their own after you quit smoking. However, there are certain lifestyle behaviors you can practice to try and accelerate the rate at which your lungs heal.
After 15 years of having quit smoking, the likelihood of developing coronary heart disease is the equivalent of a non-smoker. Similarly, the risk of developing pancreatic cancer has reduced to the same level as a non-smoker.
Tobacco smoke paralyzes and destroys some of the tiny hair-like structures in the airways called cilia. As a result, the cilia that remain have trouble sweeping mucus out of the lungs. When you stop smoking, the cilia regrow and become active again.