Second- Hand Smoking

Personally, I find smoking a disgusting addiction however; there are 47 million people out there smoking everyday. What's worse than them hurting themselves is the fact that every time they smoke they're affecting everyone by second-hand smoke.  Second-Hand smoke is a mixture of the smoke that is given off by the burning end of a cigarette,pipe or cigar and the smoke exhaled from the lungs of smokers. Thi

s is involuntarily inhaled by non-smokers. 

There are 599 ingredients in a cigarette. I won't bore you by listing all of them. A few key ones are nicotine,tar,carbon monoxide,formaldehyde,ammonia,hydrogen cyanide and arsenic. What makes smoking so hard to give up is the nicotine. Nicotine is highly addictive, it is inhaled directly into your lungs and reaches your brain in only 6 seconds. 

On to second-hand smoke, its the cause of 53,800 deaths in the United States each year. All these deaths per year are people who thought they didn't need to worry about it since they didn't smoke themselves. What they didn't realize is

 just because your not physically putting that cigarette in your mouth, your still inhaling the smoke from smokers. Smoke lingers in the air for hours after the cigarette has been smoked. There are 43 known cancer causing ingredients in a cigarette. This explain why smoking causes 3,400 lung cancer deaths per year. Heart disease is also caused by smoking/second hand smoking, 22,700 - 69,600 deaths occur because of heart disease. 

One of the worst parts of second-hand smoking is when a parent smokes with there child around. I can personally  relate to this because a good number of people on my dad's side of the family are smokers. My dad himself smokes, how

ever he never smoked with myself or my sister anywhere near him. My grandmother however would always smoke in the house with all the windows closed and didn't seem to care. 

In the US 21 million children live in homes where residents.visitor's smoke in the home on a regular basis. As a result, between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections affect infants and children. This results in 7500-15000 hospitalization's and 430 sudden infant death syndromes (SIDS) in the US annually. 

So my advice to you is if someone's smoking anywhere near you get as far away as you can, never inhale it, and if you do smoke stop! 

A website & 2 video's : 
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/secondhandsmoke.html
Secondhand Smoke: Triumphs & Tragedies 

The World 's Most Powerful Commercial : Smoking 

Child obesity and Youth Sports

          Obesity is defined as " The condition of being obese; increased body weight caused by excessive accumulation of fat" (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obesity). 18% of children today are obese. On the other hand most children are involved in some type of youth sport like pop warner, soccer and very recently lacrosse. In 1987 15 million children played town, club or recreation soccer, in 2002 it went up to 17.5 million. Oner the last 15 years pop warner football has doubled from 130,000 to 260,000! Lastly, in 2005 there was a count of 205,000 youth lacrosse players.

What I'm wondering is, with such a rise in youth sport why is there such a large increase in child obesity?  I remember back when I played town soccer it wasn't vigorous or to competitive but, it was a great was to stay active and have fun with kids your own age. If you think about it they have practice 2 - 3 times a week about 1.5 - 2 hours each time. An hour of casual soccer for kids burns between 300 -  350 calories depending how hard the playing is. Playing pop warner football isn't exactly a cake walk itself, about an hour of that can burn more than 400 calories.

So how can kids be obese while burning so much in just an hour? Well first off not all kids participate in youth sports. However why are those who do having such health problems especially with there weight? 

For the most part, I consider parents and video games the biggest suspects. Just like youth sport and obesity video games have become more and more popular over the years. In August 2008 1.08 billion dollers worth of hardware, software and accessories were sold. Of course not all of this is being used by just children. Before the days of video games children used to go outside and play instead of sitting in front of the coach playing games and eating all day. The other reason I think children are obese is because of parents. Not all parents know how to eat properly themselves, so how are they supposed to teach their children to eat correctly. Granted the world isn't one day going to be filled with fit people who eat right and exercise regularly, but hopefully we can at least start with the children and get the statistics back the where they should be. There is no reason 18% of children should be obese.