Smoking, especially cigarette smoking, lowers your good cholesterol, while slightly increasing your bad cholesterol.  Smoking also increases the chance of your blood clotting.  Tobacco smoke is often cited as one of the six major risk factors of heart disease that you can change or treat.

Smoking is bad in any situation, but it is especially serious if you have high cholesterol or any kind of heart ailment.  What is known about the dangerous combination of high cholesterol and smoking is this:

• the more you smoke, the greater the chance to increase your cholesterol
• the longer you take to smoke a cigarette increases the amount of your cholesterol that will be affected
• the deeper you inhale, the more significant decrease in good cholesterol and increase in bad cholesterol
• people who inhale passive smoke also suffer the effects of smoking