Kids who smoke menthol more likely to get hooked

Kids who smoke menthol more likely to get hooked
By Amy Norton
Oct 30, 2012
(Reuters Health)

Kids who experiment with menthol cigarettes are more likely to become habitual smokers than their peers who start out with the regular variety, new research findings suggest.

In a study of tens of thousands of U.S. students, researchers found that kids who were dabbling with menthol cigarettes were 80 percent more likely to become regular smokers over the next few years, versus those experimenting with regular cigarettes.

Menthol is added to cigarettes to give them a minty "refreshing" flavor. Critics have charged that menthol makes cigarettes more palatable to new smokers - many of whom are kids - and may be especially likely to encourage addiction...

Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.

Here is more evidence about how much we harm children by failing to educate them.

Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
New York Times
September 20, 2012

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks...

Even one puff of tobacco harmful, reports surgeon general

Even one puff of tobacco harmful, reports surgeon general
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 10, 2010

...Tobacco smoke contains more than 7,000 chemicals and compounds, including hundreds that are toxic and at least 70 that cause cancer, according to the report. That means there is no "risk-free level of exposure" to tobacco smoke. Even a whiff of tobacco smoke can adversely affect the body, the report concludes.

"The chemicals in tobacco smoke reach your lungs quickly every time you inhale, causing damage immediately," Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said in a statement. "Inhaling even the smallest amount of tobacco smoke can also damage your DNA, which can lead to cancer." ...