How Smoking Directly Destroys Vitamin A & C in Your Body
September 11th, 2006 (Quit Smoking)
When it comes to the dangers of smoking and applying the will to quit, you can’t leave out a discussion of vitamin and mineral supplements. Vitamins are essential to life, and they can make or break a person’s health. Unfortunately, a cigarette is not a vitamin’s best friend.
When it comes to the health of your lungs, research suggests that vitamin A keeps the cilia that clean the lungs alive and kicking so that they can perform their sweeping action. Vitamin A also is responsible for the health of the goblet cells in your lungs. The goblet cells secrete mucus that acts like a barrier and prevents bacteria from entering the lungs. Vitamin A also prevents cancers of the skin, bladder, and breast.
Vitamin A does its work well until it comes into contact with some of the chemicals in cigarette
smoke. Something - we don’t know what - in the cigarette smoke attacks and destroys vitamin A. This puts people who smoke at risk for lung infections and cancer.
An eye-opening study showed that heavy long-term smokers who were given vitamin A for six
months had a decrease in the sorts of changes that lead to cancer in their lung cells. Another American Cancer Society study showed that heavy smokers with low vitamin A levels had three times as many cases of cancer as heavy smokers with normal levels of vitamin A.
There is a good amount of evidence that suggests that vitamin A protects against some of the negative effects of smoking. Does this mean that if people who smoke take in extra amounts of vitamin A, they can eliminate or lower their risks for smoking-related illnesses? Not exactly. At best, they would receive a little extra protection.
Another important vitamin is vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid (it prefers to be called vitamin C). Vitamin C is an antioxidant, which means it blocks the formation of several cancer causing substances such as nitrosamines.
As is true for vitamin A, chemicals in the smoke you inhale with cigarettes destroy vitamin C. In fact, smoking a single cigarette breaks down the same amount of vitamin C as you would get from eating an orange. (And no, that doesn’t mean you will be okay if you eat 20 oranges a day and continue to smoke.) It’s a good idea to take vitamins regardless of whether or not you have ever smoked. That’s because most of us don’t eat a balanced diet that provides us with all of the vitamins we need. Your best bet is to buy multivitamins and take one every day.