#1 Takeaway from American Heart Month: Stop Smoking

We don’t mean to nag. But would you nourish your body with chemicals found in toilet cleaners and rat poison? If you smoke, that’s what you’re doing.

We’ll do anything to help you stop smoking, even post this graphic, which shows you exactly what you’re breathing when you light up. Smoking may help you get through a long workday or a stressful time in your life, but you already know that’s not enough payback to risk the damage that smoking can do. As February, American Heart Month, comes to a close, we remind you that smoking is not only terrible for your heart but also causes 90 percent of lung cancer deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And no wonder—read those chemicals on the graphic! When you light a cigarette, toxic chemicals are released as they burn. You or those around you breathe them in the smoke.

“Cigarettes contain somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 chemicals,” reports Brian Tiep, M.D., director of pulmonary rehabilitation and smoking cessation at City of Hope. Some of these chemicals also can be found in batteries, rocket fuel, toilet cleaners and rat poison—that one’s arsenic. Nicotine, not particularly harmful in itself, is the chemical that hooks you.

In this final week of American Heart Month, give up smoking! Do it for your family, do it for your clients, do it for the salon industry—and do it for yourself.