Live and let die
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 at 9:10 According to reports last week, including this one in the Guardian:
Researchers at University College London found that on average a single cigarette takes about 20 minutes off a person’s life, meaning that a typical pack of 20 cigarettes can shorten a person’s life by nearly seven hours.
Commissioned by the Department of Health (who else?!), the study was reported nationally and internationally and the intention was clear – to scare smokers into giving up in the new year.
Perhaps, if you are thinking of quitting, it might serve a purpose. My guess, though, is that the impact on most smokers will be minimal.
Yes, smoking poses a risk to their health, but that's what it is – a risk, like Russian roulette, not a guarantee of illness and an early death.
Most people accept that the more you smoke the greater the risk, but the idea that smoking poses a linear risk that can be measured, cigarette by cigarette, isn't borne out by the actualité.
As Daily Mail columnist Tom Utley wrote on Friday:
At the rate I smoke, I would have been knocking more than 12 hours off my life expectancy every single day for the past 52 years! Yet somehow I’ve made it to 71, with nothing more serious than a persistent cough.
Others could say the same thing. David Hockney, for example, 87 last year despite a lifetime of smoking. And there are thousands of similar cases.
As readers know, I don't dispute the health risks of smoking, but I do think there's far more to it than totting up the number of cigarettes smoked and calculating the years that could be lost.
Another journalist, Robert Crampton of The Times, estimated that as a result of his 12 cigarettes a day habit, he is set to lose seven years of his life, ‘but which seven years’?
Say I’d never smoked but nonetheless am scheduled to cark it on New Year’s Day 2032, aged 67, after a cerebral aneurysm. That’s not three score years and ten, let alone the big eight-oh, which is what you reckon on nowadays. Anything much less and people start waffling how “he was taken from us too soon” or some such.
But how about I’m on course to make it to 87? Which isn’t entirely unreasonable, given I’m not overweight, I don’t drink and my genetic inheritance is optimistic. But because I have smoked, I’ll actually croak at 80. And what if those seven extra years of nothingness, had they been spent above ground, were marked by increasing physical frailty, loss of independence, memory, potency, mental capacity, maybe even self-identity? In that case I’d welcome the early departure.
According to the Office for National Statistics' life expectancy calculator, my life expectancy is 85, but that can only be a very rough estimate because it doesn't take into account factors such as lifestyle, medical history, genes, or simple bad luck.
The point is, you may be able to calculate the average age a generation of men or women will die in a specific country, but calculating the exact lifespan of every individual is impossible, which is why some life expectancy calculators offer three results – including the best and worst outcomes, which may be a decade apart.
A friend of mine uses a life expectancy app that predicts the exact day you will die, and last year it gave him three possible dates, the worst case scenario being in 2030 when he will be 71.
The chances of it being accurate must be very small, but my question is: unless you have a bucket list of things you want to do before you go (or need to get your tax affairs in order), why would you want to know when you are going to die?!
Anyway, here's a photo of Tom Utley. It was taken at Smoke On The Water, the Forest boat party, on October 22 last year. Fingers crossed, Tom will be with us for a long while yet.
Reader Comments (1)
Obvious lies like this only serve to put into doubt even the core message that smoking can seriously damage health.
After all, if they lie like this then what else have they lied about? Maybe every single scare story since the US surgeon General's report is also untrue.
They are taking us for fools but it's becoming very clear who the idiots are and it's not smokers.