Smoking In Japan Takes 10 Years Of Life - Not Four

According to a new study published on bmj.com (formerly the British Medical Journal), smoking reduces one's life expectancy by 10 years in Japan - not four as originally suspected from previous studies.

Holy crap! Smokers... get the hell out of Japan or you'll lose six more years of your life!

I suspect the assumption that Japanese people only lost four years of life from smoking was due to the heavy drinking of green tea (o-cha), which people believe contained anti-cancer benefits.

Now... the Japanese are back on par with smokers from Britain and the U.S... not that they actually were ahead of them.

Here's the interesting part, though. These tests actually owe their origins to the Life Span Study (LSS) that was begun in 1950 to discover the effects of radiation by tracking the lifespan of some 100,000 people around the world... including Hiroshima and Nagasaki which had the crap bombed out of them by one atomic bomb each... so far the first and only country ever to be exposed to an atomic weapon on purpose.

Now... you might be wondering how a radiation survey could provide results on smoking... well, the respondents were those who had some minimal exposure to radiation... but over the years researchers began to wonder if other outside factors could also affect human lifespan.

So... for Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the smoking status of 27, 311 men and 40,662 women were picked from 1963 through 1992. As well, the mortality rates from one year after ascertaining the smoking status until January 1, 2008 was finally analyzed and the results presented two days ago.

I'll spare you the details, but just know that no matter where you seem to be from, smoking tends to knock off 10 years of your life.

Cheers
Andrew Joseph