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How does it account for stress.

My hunch is many people smoke because of stress, same stress from socioeconomic situation may age someone outta stress?

Now if you adopt a kid from such family into low stress enviornment and they still age, now that's better link.

Wow, that’s really eye-opening. It’s one thing to know smoking harms your own health, but realizing it could affect your future children at a biological level adds a whole new layer. The idea that habits formed as a teenager can leave such a lasting legacy is honestly a bit scary. Just more reason we need to keep pushing awareness and prevention, especially for young people.
The difficulty will be getting this message across to teenagers who can only think six months ahead. Even talking to them about the impact when they are older will be pointless, so about their potential future progeny...
Do what many countries do and price them out. Since age limits are only as effective as ID verification, we know some kids are able to buy cigarettes and vapes. With a high enough tobacco tax, they can’t afford the habit and will be less inclined to even start.

As a side effect it really does a number on the addiction of adults, too!

Good to know. I never touched a cig till I was 26 and got addicted a bit post a breakup but quit it earlier this year.

My dad however probably has been smoking since he was 18 so I don't know what good that does me besides the second hand smoke I had to endure.

Smoking in puberty is an obvious signal of many other malign traits: low socio- educational-economic level, violence, mental disease, besides of possible harm to their sperm. Many confounders that are difficult to include.
I think this needs to factor in cultural attitudes toward smoking. It varies based on the location, but in my experience generally smoking is more widespread among lower income people, especially if their kids are smoking. And so I question whether the shorter lifespan is more reflective of less access to healthcare, good food, etc. more broadly.
What if their dad left home though, so limited exposure?
Smoking is one of those harmful activities where state has some incentives to not be too proactive in preventing people from doing it. Eases a lot of social security costs down the line (vs cancer treatments, but many go out quickly via heart attack or stroke, just like my uncle did).

Quickest fix would be total ban (with addicts moving en masse to black market). Not practically possible in regular democracies.

Its up to people themselves for the most effective care. Easy talk about addiction which is ranked around cca heroin addiction in terms of how difficult it is to shed it. One always pays for one's mistakes, here its actually the offsprings...

To me the key element is the addiction aspect. It’s one thing to ingest a substance which has good short term results but bad long term ones, but entirely another when the machinery of corporations is used to maximize that usage and make it as addictive as possible.

As a side note, the movie The Insider by Michael Mann with Al Pacino and Russell Crowe is the single most effective anti-smoking thing I’ve come across. It shows how evil those corporations are and what they did to a whistleblower.

You say that as if smoking tobacco that does not come from corporations would not be addictive!

All forms of tobacco are inherently addictive due to the presence of naturally occurring nicotine, which is the main driver of addiction.

Smartphones are addictive and designed by large corporations to be so. Ready to give yours up?
See also, processed food!
I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)
> I never understand why people don't talk about banning the general usage of sugar, probably has far worse effects on societal systems than smoking does. (attention, fatness, hormonal imbalances)

Here is the US Health Secretary talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/rfk-jr-sugar...

Too easy to work around and too hard to define. Look at a lot of "No added sugar" sweet things - they can use fruit juice concentrates, or plant syrups etc. Then there are artificial sweeteners. Then there things bred for sweetness.
Because that would be utterly ludicrous? I enjoy a few small sweet things every day as part of a healthy diet. This harms nobody, me included.

Much better to make more effort in schools to teach people how to cook good food (including enough fat and salt that it's actually tasty). Plus maybe change some relative prices so that they eat less sugar on average.

Because it is waaaay easier to bully minorities, esp. in democracies? If you take something away from the majority, you run a huge risk of loosing in the next election...
I always wonder about the heroin comparison. I just doesn't check out for me. Feels inappropriate. Heroin has pretty pronounced withdrawal symptoms, which are (AIUI) mostly physical withdrawal. At least from personal experience, nicotine withdrawal doesn't do anything to me. I just recently spent a day in an ICU, and had no craving at all. Same for longer smoking breaks, like a week or two. No craving. However, I sometimes miss the socialisation / being occupied thing, which is plain mental addiction. Maybe I am special in this regard, but I doubt it. Most "nervious" smokers I met were, IMO, "protesting" against the fact that they are currently not free to do what they wanted. You can hype yourself up a lot without actual physical reasons.
I agree. I've never done heroin but I understand the withdrawal is absolutely horrible.

I stopped using nicotine this month. I've been using snus which is a Nordic product similar to chewing tobacco. You put it under your upper lip, the type I've been using has significantly more nicotine per dose than a cigarette. Like 2-4 times as much, 25mg per dose.

It was fine. The first day was pretty hard for me, I was sitting next to a lady who kept her snus box on her desk and I really wanted to bum one but didn't. Day two was a bit easier, day three easier still and after that I felt like I was done. I'm on day 16 now and hardly think about it any more.

It's strange because I've been using nicotine for almost two decades and I've been wanting to drop it for most of that time, even did drop it once but blundered and started again a year or so later. I've tried and failed to quit so many times, but the times that it's actually worked have always just felt like a state of mind difference. Like I didn't really want to quit the other times. When I really decide and all doubt is gone it's quite easy to quit. It's just hard to get to that state of mind and keep it.

> You can hype yourself up a lot

It's likely that you're doing this to yourself by underselling your cravings. Presumably you came out of your ICU visit and began smoking again but you've lied to yourself about the reasons why. The physical aspect of nicotine addiction is extremely well documented.

There are certain genetic markers that can make it extremely hard to quit - nothing like you experienced.
A huge part of nicotine addiction is psychological compounded by physical symptoms.
They hiked the taxes so high on cigarettes in Australia, they basically created a cigarette mafia. Look it up. It's out of control.
It's to do with complete lack of will to enforce. You can open a dodgy tobacconist shop, get shut down with a ridiculously low non-personal penalty, and open another one two doors down.
> Not practically possible in regular democracies.

In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical? Not arguing, just curious.

>In what kind of irregular democracy is this practical?

Insane levels of homogeneous demographics and group think. Think like HOA or school board chock full o' Karens doing something wild. That's the kind of situation you'd need.

Benevolent dictatorship with a veneer of democracy? Or any system that does motivate pushing for long term actual solutions, not just chasing votes for next election cycle.
This makes me wonder, in democracies there are stuff you simply cannot ban. What is the solution?
Restriction of rights is a spectrum. For example, we know that driving cars carries some (very small) risk. If we banned driving, fewer people would die (from car related accidents). This must be balanced against individual rights and social outcomes. If we banned cars, how many people would lose their jobs? How many people would be unable to get to hospital? It's like that banning cars would cause more harm than lives it saves. This is an extreme scenario to illustrate not all bad things should be banned.

Smoking is more nuanced. For the most part (as long as public spaces and spaces with children are appropriately regulated), smokers hurt only themselves. In countries with public healthcare, this can increase care costs, but most studies now find that because smokers die much younger, their combined lifetime costs are actually lower. Old people are very expensive to care for. So the question becomes: to what degree do we want the state preventing people from hurting themselves? Where does that authority end? Alcohol? Sugar? Fatty foods? Less than eight hours of sleep? Not exercising? Too much TV and iPad? Social media? Not reading enough books? This is, IMHO, a slippery slope. For reasons of ideology and pragmatism, I do not support regulation for "victimless" activities, unless there are significant social costs/harm. This means I support legal tobacco, marijuana, MDMA, alcohol, and and many other drugs. I also support the right to partake in extreme sports, eating junk food and sugar, and not exercising.

The implications of this particular study are very difficult to morally and legally navigate. If smoking while young can make children age slightly faster, surely there is a moral imperative to prevent those who are 15 and younger from smoking? I believe that is the case in most of the West already. However we also know that parents who don't exercise and eat poorly also tend to pass along these habits to their children. Should we also ban parents from eating at McDonalds?

You can bann cigarettes for 18yo and under and then increase the age limit once a year by a year.

You really have to force it to get hooked on tobacco. Dunno how many would bother without convenient access.

Generally, you discourage them with taxes or other restrictions. Most developed countries have very high taxes, and various legal restrictions, on tobacco, say. Many have high taxes on sugar.

There aren't really _that_ many things which fall into the "clearly harmful, but people won't give them up" category; tobacco, alcohol, sugar, maybe meat (this one can be, and has been incessantly, argued both ways to an extent), would be the big ones.

I'm sure "smoking" here is a proxy for something else that provokes substance abuse. Cigarettes are surely easier to see than psychological conditions.
What are you basing this statement on?
N=892
The number of individuals whose parents smoked during puberty is probably very small given this n value. More research is needed in my humble opinion
meaning? sample size?
More importantly: as far as I can tell, this is just observational. So they have no clue about correlation vs causation.
I can confirm I was too smart for my age in my teens. And to make growing up even faster I smoked as well. Good times, kids these days have to vape as cigarettes are too expensive, not to mention cheap synth drugs.

The times were simpler, it’ll be much harder to do a similar study in the future due to the proliferation of new carcinogenic substances in food, drugs, drinks, etc. All in all we are healthier anyway.

People may age faster if their mam read fake news during puberty
Or.... smoking may be indicative of people from poorer backgrounds, where health is generally lower. (cant say for sure, but thats the case where I am from)

Statistics 101: Correlation is not causation.

They say I can live to be 100 years old if I give up all the things that make me want to live to be 100 years old.
You can eat salad everyday, never enjoy a drink and then die from some random shit in your 50s anyway. Sadly, I hear stories like that quite often.

I get it, this proves nothing, but I have plenty of people in my family who drank daily, chain smoked and lived until they were into their late 80s / 90s.

It doesn't mean you live longer, it just seems like it.
Or were involuntarily conscripted in a war of empire and exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam leading to spina bifida and ADHD.
Um, what does that have to do with the topic? Yes, people die of environmental exposure to things. This is about a specific exposure, at a specific age period.