Women and Smoking

Smoking has been glamorized in the media from early days and the hottest actresses like Marlyn Monroe could be seen with a thin long cigarette dangling from their mouth. Lately you see a lot of hacking cough baby boomer actresses but the damage has been done.

I've always wondered what would happen to the large tobacco companies as more and more America gets literate about the dangers of smoking and the slow but steady rise of knowledge slowly reduces the number of children who get addicted. The answer at times appears to be - move to the developing world.

I have often visited other countries for work reasons and never cease to be amazed by the number of smokers in that country. You'd expect nicotine addiction to be a poor man's respite from a hard day's work. But the surprise is the urban white collar recent college graduate who doesn't seem to find any other way to express his 'coolness' except by becoming a chimney. In fact when a lot of foreign workers visit the various tech companies in the US, you can spot them smoking like there's no tomorrow, often in various pantomimes mimicking whoever misguided role models they have. With nicotine the source of the largest revenue for these countries, most of the time, the government is reluctant to ban smoking ads from the popular media. It will likely take a while before US type activism takes hold in the rest of the world.

One thing that has changed over the years during my visits is the number of women smokers. It is difficult to get to a restaurant without running into several women smoking. This is a cultural change and in one area where I think the equality of men and women would hurt us all. At least in the more conservative cultures, you could expect women to keep some sanity in the world while the men acted recklessly. Now it is painful to see that the one person in the family who is likely to still spend more time with the next generation is falling for the vice too.

Lest you call me a sexist, there are strong biological reasons why it is especially detrimental for women to smoke. There are several studies linking smoking pregnant women and birth defects. Recently, a study done in Japan claims that smoking women have obese children. While there are enough reasons why children get obese these days, it would be much tougher for them to fight those reasons if they get a head start from before birth!

The study, conducted over two decades in Yamanashi University's School of Medicine, doesn't postulate reasons behind this 3 times rise in obesity for children of smoking women. One guess is that smoking reduces the nutrition going to the womb. It could make sense of course. We know some people smoke to keep the weight down, a diet of its own.

Another reason for the world to curb spread of this legal drug!