What Does Cigarette Smoke Contain?
Cigarette smoke contains literally thousands of different chemical compounds, the grand majority of which are toxic. Just seeing a list of these compounds and finding out that they can cause damage to you is really not of any assistance. The important part is the dosage of each chemical. Of the thousands of chemicals in smoke, many of them only appear in a few nanograms per cigarette. To understand that better, a nanogram is equal to one billionth of one gram and one gram is three hundredths of an ounce. Also found in cigarette smoke are roughly a dozen ingredients that appear in larger quantities and are also toxic in nature. One ingredient of cigarettes is tar. Each cigarette contains somewhere between ten and fourteen milligrams of tar. Some cigarettes are advertised as low tar, but these cigarettes still contain eight or nine milligrams. The function of your alveoli is impeded by the tar in cigarette smoke because tar coats the lungs just like a chimney. The alveoli that are affect
