Smoking and Diabetes

Obviously smoking is bad for you, but smoking and diabetes is an even worse combination! You know you shouldn’t smoke, but if you have diabetes, you have even more reasons to quit than the rest of us.

Smoking Increases Your Risk of Diabetes

Let’s take a look at the risk factors of diabetes. Here are some of the most important:

• Family History
• Race--Being Black, Hispanic, or Native American
• Obesity
• Stress
• Certain Medications
• Injury to the Pancreas
• Autoimmune Disorders
• High Blood Pressure
• High Cholesterol
• Age
• Excess Drinking (Alcohol
• Smoking
• Pregnancy

Several of these risk factors can be increased by smoking--high blood pressure and high cholesterol among them.

A study in the Journal of Epidemiology concluded that smoking 16 to 25 cigarettes a day increases your risk of getting Type 2 Diabetes by three times that of a non-smoker.

These are some of the reasons smoking and diabetes is such a bad combination.

How Smoking Complicated Diabetes

If you already have diabetes, smoking makes managing it more difficult. There are certain complications of diabetes that smoking makes worse, such as eye disease, heart disease, stroke, vascular disease, kidney disease, nerve damage, and foot problems, among others.

Since smoking damages blood vessels in your body it can decrease the amount of oxygen reaching your tissues. This can lead to various problems like stillbirth, miscarriage, heart attack, or stroke.

By constricting blood vessels, smoking makes it harder for tissues at the periphery of your body to get a proper supply of blood. Diabetics can already have problems with their feet. Smoking only makes this worse.

Smoking can decrease joint mobility.

Importantly for diabetics, smoking can increase your blood sugar level. This makes it harder for you to control your diabetes.

What’s the Solution?

Diabetes is a chronic medical problem. So you’ll have to follow your doctor’s advice about how to manage it. But why make it worse by smoking?

Smoking and diabetes just absolutely do not go together. So, what you need to do is quit!

Now, I know this is difficult (how about very difficult?), but think about how much the quality of your life can be improved by quitting. There are many ways to quit. Read around in this website and look at others. You’ll find a way to quit, if you want to.

Quitting smoking will be the single most important thing you can do for yourself!

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