Smoking is not only dangerous for your lungs, it can also irreversibly damage your teeth. Aside from the obvious respiratory and circulatory repercussions, there are other problems that are associated with smoking. Owing to the close proximity of the gums to the smoke caused by the habit, smokers now make up 50% of people with gum disease in the world.

Smoking can make your bones brittle, and prolonged exposure to smoke can lead to a pronounced risk of the bone and support structure of the teeth being eaten away.

Not only your teeth, but also your gums could be damaged by too much smoking. The cells in your gums are essential for beautiful teeth because they not only support your teeth structure, they also supply the needed nutrients, especially calcium, to your teeth. Once the toxic substances in cigarette smoke affects the gums, the natural regeneration of the gum cells slow down. It can be dangerous if the gums and bones that support the teeth are already degenerating. It means the whole area can become vulnerable to bacteria.

Smoking slows down the healing process which means your mouth might not recover fast if you have sores and you smoke. This particularly applies if you have orthodontic and dental surgery. Damage on the gums from any source is supposed to heal right away, with the way the body is equipped by antibodies and elements that can fight off infection. However, if you smoke too much, the healing process of mouth sores can be extremely slow. This is all because the smoke itself can cause cellular decay in the gums. Smoke slowly undoes any repairs done to the gums through surgery.

If your whole mouth is compromised by bacteria, tooth decay will ensue as well as other damage. The teeth become loose because the strength of the fibers that hold them together are loosening up. You know you need to deal with the problem if after smoking for a while, you get tooth aches. I don’t mean tooth aches that are directly caused by cavities. What I mean is the kind of aching that comes after you eat something cold or hot. The gums and the teeth are weakening to bacteria, which means you have to stop whatever it is that is causing these things to keep the damage from getting any worse.

Cigars and pipes also lead to the same teeth conditions as cigarettes. To be safe, don’t smoke. You might have heard that smoking is bad for you. Well, now you know that smoking can also cause you to develop hideous looking teeth. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people consider smoking to be one of the filthiest, least healthy habits a person can have.

If quitting smoking is difficult for you, you may want to try switching to an electronic cigarette.
E-cigarettes do not make you smell, are much cheaper, and do not contain all of the chemicals that a regular cigarette does.

Even without knowing that sleep is the most important thing you can do regularly to keep yourself healthy, you already know the consequences of not getting enough sleep on a normal day. First of all is the issue of concentration. If you don’t get enough sleep during the night, you may be unable to focus on anything for the whole day. Moreover, you may get sick easily because stress on the body caused by lack of sleep could greatly compromise the immune system. Some research say that those people who don’t get enough sleep are more sickly than those who regularly sleep on time every day.

If we focus primarily on our health, sleeping must be a close second when it comes to prioritizing what we need to do to live healthy. Sleeping every night should come before consuming huge amounts of fruits and veggies, taking some good nutritional supplements, getting adequate exercise, and not being subjected to too much stress.

It is no secret that being in a financial crisis has made people lose more sleep because they’re taking on new jobs on top of the old ones, but the thing is that we need to get our fill of sleep to stay healthy. The long term effects of sleep deprivation are staggering. You know you owe yourself the sleep you badly need if your body starts showing signs of hypertension, diabetes and heart ailments. Some say that adding 3 or 4 hours in a week to your normal sleeping patterns could greatly reduce the occurrence of these diseases.

So, how much sleep do we need, exactly? A child who is 6-12 years old should get 10 to 12 hours of sleep daily. A teenager will require less sleep, but still should rest for 9 hours at least every night. An adult can settle for 7 hours of sleep every night.

How about daytime snoozing? It’s a lot better to rest during the night time because your body can restore the melatonin levels naturally. These pigments are what causes your circadian rhythm to be the way it is. If you habitually sleep during the day, your body won’t be able to replenish its melatonin supply fast enough. The result is you won’t be able to sleep normally during the night time, and become an insomniac. The hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. are ideal for sleeping.

Melatonin is a natural hormone generated by your body’s pineal gland. The hormone is secreted during night-time to make you sleepy. This is the body’s natural way of doing a “re-boot”. You see, your body craves sleep and even if you’d rather spend most of your time being busy with something else, your body cannot deny itself the sleep it needs. Thus melatonin is secreted to make sleep come naturally. If you insist on not sleeping however, your melatonin supply is depleted.

Besides being a sleep synchronizer, melatonin is more famous for being an antioxidant. That the body produces it naturally during the night time should tell you something. The body protects itself and uses sleep as the best time to produce copious amounts of the body’s antioxidant.