If you're a smoker you might want to look away now. Unless you want some extra motivation to quit that is, in which case step right this way. A nurse in North Carolina shared this video comparing the lungs of a smoker with the lungs of a healthy patient. The smoker had smoked their way through one pack of cigarettes a day for 20 years, Amanda Eller wrote on Facebook. The difference between the two sets of lungs is immediately striking before she even inflates the lungs. The first obvious difference is the color. In the healthy set of lungs, they are a normal reddish pink, whereas the smoker's cancerous lungs are blackened from years of inhaling tar. What's putting people off smoking, however, is seeing the lungs being inflated. As Eller explains in the video, the lungs collapse in a way not seen in the healthy set. "The elastance is gone," she says in the video. "So they will stretch out but then the recoil of them just snaps right back because there's nothing left to hold them open." It's rather upsetting and alarming to see, for smokers and non-smokers alike. By contrast, when she inflates the non-smoker's lungs, they inflate and remain inflated for longer when she releases the pump. Around 443,000 deaths in the US are attributed to smoking cigarettes every year, according to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), with lung cancer accounting for around 138,000 of these mortalities. Shocking statistics and probably ones you've heard before, but people appear to be more shocked out of their smoking habit by visceral displays like the one shown in the above videos, which have been shared over 500,000 times. One user commented, "That's it, no more. I am DONE smoking I swear to the LORD I just had my last cigarette," whilst others have tagged in their smoker friends or promised to show it to their smoking family members. If you're alarmed enough to quit thanks to the video, take a look at the CDC's advice on how to quit, and good luck. Source
