Smoking: A Surprising Discovery

On a recent cold evening, as I was rushing out the door, I grabbed my daughter’s jacket and put it on.

Outside, I nestled my hands in her jacket’s pockets, and felt something wrong. I was touching something that made me stop in my tracks.

I pulled out the item I had felt, and stared at it. It was a lighter. Why am I finding a lighter in my daughter’s jacket?

I instantly cancelled my outing and returned home. I showed the lighter to my wife. “Why was this in her jacket?”

My wife was mute for a second, and then said, “She started smoking.”

My jaw dropped. We ingrained in our kids the healthiest habits. How could my daughter have adopted smoking?

She is already 19 and out of the house, and there was not much I could do, except for trying to talk to her.

We met a couple of days later and spoke. The conversation went nowhere. She just felt like smoking, and that was it. I could not tell her what to do.

But I couldn’t just sit on my hands helplessly either. I had to do something.

I decided to show her the science.

I didn’t expect to find much beyond the usual stuff—cancer, emphysema, cardiovascular risks…

Surprisingly, what I found was worse.

One study showed that cigarette smoke was “associated with a shrink size and poor quality of oocytes” (oocytes are ovarian cells that become ova).

According to another study, “Smoking alters the meiotic spindle of oocytes and spermatozoa, leading to chromosome errors which affect reproductive outcomes,” meaning, smoking damages the ova’s DNA, and thus the DNA of the smoker’s future children.

In another they found that “maternal smoking can exert multigenerational effects on the ovarian function of the progeny.” In other words, the damage is not just to your ova, but also to the ova of your daughters and granddaughters.

I emailed my findings to my daughter, with a concluding note:
“You are making decisions that might harm your future kids, and they have no say about it.”

She quit.

p.s.

Smoking also causes DNA damage to sperm.