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Although it cannot be contested that smoking is dangerous to your health, that it is a leading factor in lung cancer as well as a whole range of other medical problems, it also impacts on the way that you look.
Akimichi Morita and his colleagues at the Nagoya City University Medical School have shown that cigarette smoking may upset the body's mechanism in skin rejuvenation.
What is the important factor here is that the collagen, which forms the connective tissue, is damaged.
What Morita shows in his research is that cigarette smoke causes an increase of matrix-metalloproteinases (MMPs) - which is the enzyme that breaks down old skin to make place for the new - yet it causes less collagen to be formed in the skin.
Popular belief also proclaims that smoking destroys vitamin C (ascorbic acid), and this could also be indicated to more wrinkle formation, since collagen can not be formed in the skin if there is a shortage of vitamin C.
The amount of vitamin C destroyed per cigarette smoked varies, depending on who you talk to, but general consensus seems to be that one cigarette destroys about 50 mg of vitamin C.
Decades ago, Adelle Davis, the very popular nutritionist, already advocated an increase of dietary vitamin C intake to counteract the toxic effects that smoking and environmental pollution have on the body.
So - if you do not want to quit smoking for the sake of your health, then maybe consider doing it for the sake of your looks.
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