Do I need to quit smoking to improve my immunity?

There is no hard requirement to quit smoking to improve immunity, but quitting smoking is indeed one of the currently recognized methods that can improve immune status at a low cost and high efficiency.

I met a 62-year-old Zhou when I was doing a free health clinic in the community. He had been smoking for 40 years and could not afford to smoke a pack a day. He rarely caught a cold even during the flu season. He always used himself as an example to say that "smoking does not affect immunity at all, but can smoke away viruses." This is also the most common argument used by many people who hold the view that "there is no need to quit smoking to improve immunity."

In fact, this kind of case is really not representative. I later found out through his health records that he gets up at 5 a.m. every morning to run 3 kilometers, eats light meals cooked at home for three meals, and goes to bed early and gets up early for decades. These good habits have long offset a large part of the damage to the immune system caused by smoking, but he does not take it seriously. You can think of your immunity as a 24-hour security team in your body. The components of nicotine, tar, and carbon monoxide in tobacco are equivalent to feeding sleeping pills to security team members every day and dismantling monitoring systems. The viruses and mutant cells that could have been picked out immediately are now all groggy. It is luck that no trouble occurs occasionally. The probability of an accident in the long run is definitely much higher than that of non-smokers. Take the most common cold as an example. According to clinical data, the duration of colds in smokers is generally 2 to 3 days longer than that in non-smokers, and the symptoms of phlegm and sore throat are much more severe. Many old smokers themselves should have experienced this.

Of course, some people will say that I just can’t quit for the time being. I rely on smoking to cope with the stress at work. Isn’t it possible to improve my immunity? Neither. Last year, I helped an Internet company operator do immune conditioning. He was 30 years old at the time. He smoked 15 cigarettes a day, suffered from frequent oral ulcers, and had a fever every time the season changed. When he mentioned quitting smoking, he shook his head, saying that he couldn't do his job even if he quit smoking. At that time, I did not force him to quit. I first asked him to reduce the number of cigarettes he smokes to less than 5 cigarettes a day, eat more fruits with high vitamin C content such as oranges and kiwis, take 20 minutes after get off work to walk around the community twice, and try to sleep before 11 o'clock. After three months of adjustment, although he had fewer colds, he still suffered from acute pharyngitis, which took almost a week to recover. Later, when he was working on a project, he stayed up for three consecutive days and had a fever of 39 degrees, which delayed an important meeting. When he came back, he made up his mind to quit smoking. I visited him again six months later, and he said that he had never even suffered from pharyngitis, which he often suffered before, and he rarely had minor colds.

To put it bluntly, "must quit smoking" itself is a false proposition. After all, there are very few people with good innate immunity, and smoking has minimal impact on them. Just like some people who stay up late and drink every day can live to more than ninety years old. Such individual cases have no reference value at all. For the vast majority of ordinary people, if they want to save time and energy and improve their immunity, quitting smoking is definitely the most cost-effective option. ； If you really have difficulty quitting it for the time being, you can still achieve the effect by gradually supplementing it with other healthy habits, but you will have to spend more energy to offset the hindrance of tobacco to your immune system.