If you have diabetes, smoking is no good for you.  Smoking - especially cigarette smoking - lowers your good cholesterol while slightly increasing your bad cholesterol, and raising your blood pressure.  Smoking also increases the chance of your blood clotting, and is toxic for your heart.  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 blood pressure or any kind of heart ailment.  What is known about the dangerous combination of high cholesterol, high blood pressure 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 and blood pressure  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

If you want to improve your health, stop smoking.  It is more important than changing your diet, reducing your stress, exercising, or taking any kind of vitamin, mineral or supplement.  Life is about making choices.  Make the right choice for you, your family and your friends.

At melslife, we do not like to preach, but we can find nothing positive to say about smoking.  It used to be that smoking looked cool and created a tough “bad” or sexy image.  Now – with all the information known and available – people smoking are only compromising their health, and the health of people around them.