Be Proud You Quit The Tough Fight

Wave your E-Cigs sky high my friends because this month is National Lung Cancer Awareness month. Be proud you quit the tough fight of traditional tobacco cigarettes and are becoming healthier by the day thanks to E-Cigarettes! Also, keep in mind those who still have yet to quit, you too can do your part by helping them make the switch.

Let’s take a second to learn a little more about the lungs and how we can further our heath even more!

• The average adult takes 15 to 20 breaths a minute – over 20,000 breaths a day. Your respiratory system, which includes the nose, throat, windpipe (trachea) and lungs, brings air into the body when you breathe. In the lungs, the oxygen from each breath is transferred to the bloodstream and sent to all the body’s cells as life-sustaining fuel. Keeping your lungs healthy is an important part of an overall healthy lifestyle.

• Your body has a natural defense system designed to protect the lungs. This works very well most of the time to keep out dirt and fight off germs.

• In addition to gas exchange, the respiratory system performs other roles important to breathing. These include:
  • Bringing air to the proper body temperature.
  • Moisturizing the inhaled air to the right humidity.
  • Protecting the body from harmful substances. This is done by coughing, sneezing, filtering, or swallowing them.
  • The sense of smell.

• Oxygen, a basic gas, is needed by every cell in your body in order to live. The air that comes into the body through the lungs contains oxygen and other gases. In the lungs, the oxygen is moved into the bloodstream and carried through the body. At each cell in the body, the oxygen cells are exchanged for waste gas called carbon dioxide. The bloodstream then carries this waste gas back to the lungs where the waste gas is removed from the blood stream and then exhaled from the body. This vital process, called gas exchange, is performed automatically by the lungs and respiratory system.

• Breathing allows you to take in the oxygen your cells need and expel carbon-dioxide waste. But when you exhale, you also breathe out a lot of water.How much water do you lose from breathing?When at rest, humans exhale up to 17.5 milliliters (0.59 fluid ounces) of water per hour, according to a 2012 article in the journal Polish Pneumonology and Allergology. But you lose about four times that amount when you exercise, the study said.

• Each of your lungs contains about 300 million balloon-like structures called alveoli, which replace the carbon-dioxide waste in your blood with oxygen. When these structures are filled with air, the lungs become the only organs in the human body that can float on water.In fact, medical examiners use the so-called “lung float test” during autopsies to determine if a baby was stillborn (died in the womb). If the lungs float, the baby was born alive; if the lungs don’t float, the baby was stillborn. This method is accurate 98 percent of the time, according to a 2013 study in the International Journal of Legal Medicine.

• When you breathe in, our chest swells; when you breathe out, our chest collapses. But these chest movements are not actually the result of air filling up or exiting the lungs.During inhalation, the diaphragm — a thin sheet of dome-shaped muscle that separates the chest and abdominal cavities — contracts and moves down, increasing the space in the chest cavity. At the same time, the muscles between the ribs contract to pull the rib cage upward and outward. During exhalation, the exact opposite happens.

I hope you learned a little more about your lungs today and remember clean living is happy living, so if you still smoke those nasty cigarettes just keep in mind how important your lungs are to your body!