While eating a nutritious diet does extends life somewhat, if one had to make a choice, giving up smoking would extend life far more than would eating a healthy diet (I.e., it is better to follow C-D. The health advantage of giving up smoking dwarfs all nutritional and diet considerations.
What if you include exercise in you include exercise in (B),.
Give up the smoking. Ignore the food police, the effects of eating processed food pale in comparison to what nicotine does to every organ in your body.
That’s not really the question, though. The question is basically whether smoking is worse for you than an unhealthy diet.
Smoking on average cuts about a decade or so off of your life (numbers vary, but about 10 years is commonly cited).
I don’t know that I would specify being a vegetarian, as humans aren’t herbivores (we lack the proper teeth and digestive systems). Humans are omnivores, and our biology developed to eat both plants and animals. You can do a lot of damage to yourself by switching to a vegetarian diet if you don’t do it carefully.
Also, the human digestive system can break down almost any food. To some degree, it doesn’t matter so much whether it comes from McDonald’s our if it comes from your local health food store. The bad thing about McDonald’s isn’t so much what is in it, but how much is in it. If you only ate about a fourth of your Big Mac and a fourth of your fries, and only took a few sips from your soda, you’d probably be fine, though you probably wouldn’t want to eat that every day. It’s gulping down an entire Big Mac meal in one sitting that really packs on the calories.
For the sake of argument though, let’s specify someone who basically lives a healthy lifestyle (reasonably healthy diet in moderate proportions, combined with exercise) and is in reasonably good shape vs. someone who is obese and does not exercise. The level of obesity matters here. If you are only somewhat obese (class I and class II obesity as defined by the NIH, for example), your expected lifespan isn’t impacted all that much. It’s class III obesity (BMI of 40 or higher) where your lifespan numbers start to go south in a hurry. At a BMI of 40, you can expect to lose about 6.5 years off of your life. With a BMI above 55, you can expect to lose 14 years off of your life.
So with the OP, it could go either way. If you eat crappy food but don’t let your BMI get above 40, then C-D is better than A-B. If you eat too many Big Macs and get your BMI up above 50, then C-D would be worse for you than A-B.
‘Healthy diet’ is much harder to define than regular smoker or not, even before getting to the very much broader range of degree. For example there’s no solid evidence that becoming a vegetarian is healthier than remaining an omnivore (as is natural for humans). And the differences between ‘organic’ and non is way overhyped. Likewise there’s a lack of solid evidence that ‘processing’ per se actually makes food less healthy. Some processes do, others it’s not clear.
It would probably be better to compare the end product of eating/exercise habits: being way overweight*, to smoking. Not just ‘overweight’ because some definitions of that include people that some studies say are better off at that weight. Like morbidly obese maybe. Still, being worse than smoking is a high hurdle.
This is GQ. The first few responses may well be true, but I wish they had included more supporting information or cites, so that they didn’t sound so much like WAGs.
“Healthy diet” and “healthy exercise” can’t really be defined separately from each other. What’s a healthy diet for Michael Phelps, most folks wouldn’t even be able to eat. But for purposes of this question, since we’re looking at “everything other than cigarettes”, I think that it’s fine to combine them: In other words, we’re comparing a nonsmoking couch potato who eats fast food all the time to a smoker who’s reasonably active and eats an appropriate diet for his activity level.
This is a great idea, I think it’s the only approach where we might hope to find some solid data to approach the OP’s question. Good solid data on diet are sparse, for obvious reasons - it’s impossible to run an adequately controlled experiment with human diet for adequate time. I doubt that there are any worthwhile studies on the relationship between diet and smoking habits. When we’re this unsure about diet alone, who would expend effort with trying to figure out which of these permutations is worse?
I have often wondered this.
My family are all heavy drinkers, some smoke …but they all spout exercise and diet. I don’t understand how these things can co-exist. I am the ONLY non-drinker in the group. I am also lazy and don’t do a regulated exercise routine. I walk my dogs and do a bit of yoga. I think I will probably outlive my older sibs and most of the younger ones. My lifestyle is more simple and protected. I watch my diet carefully because I am type 1 diabetic from a very early age. Even with that condition, I am far and away more healthy, in my family.
Physician here. Boarded in Internal Medicine (among others). So (depending on your bias) either a useful opinion or a dangerously uneducated and heavily biased opinion. LOL.
In my personal opinion, it’s idiotic to smoke and hope that you offset the damage with healthful eating. Like building your home in a flood-prone gully and making sure your sump works.
The extent to which healthful eating is super good for you is nearly impossible to quantify. As a rule of thumb, if you actually restrict your total caloric input, you can probably get by with eating anything. Add fiber to keep your gut healthy.
A “healthy” diet is way way way overplayed as a mechanism by which to stay healthy. You can think of a “healthy” diet as follows:
Stuff that has a definite positive health benefit when you eat it. (Poorly understood, but there probably are such substances.)
Stuff that is gonna definitely hurt you if you eat it. (Charred fat, e.g.)
Avoiding too many calories.
Sorting out those three in the context of genes is damn near impossible because the controls are so hard to…control.
Most people who smoke are going to pay the price. Crappy vasculature, increased cancer risk and diminished pulmonary function top the list of predictable outcomes.
It makes no sense to me that patients try to turn their choices into a binary decision, and I think the reason is probably a hope that you can offset smoking by avoiding an unhealthful diet. You can’t.
One last thing; There is probably no need to quit smoking if you are older (say, 60+) and have a lifetime of smoking. It’s too late to do much good–at least for your overall longevity.
Actually very few, if any, health problems from smoking are caused by nicotine. The problems come from the 4000 or so other chemicals in burning tobacco.
I don’t know how they picked those 4 factors, or if other factors are more important.
There is a graph in that link where you can pick your answers to each of the 4 questions, and your odds of surviving to 85.
Basically, smoking is as damaging as the other 3 combined. If you’re a 75 year old male and you drink heavily, don’t exercise and don’t eat fruit your odds of surviving to 85 are 53% if you are a non smoker. If you are a 75 year old male and you don’t drink, you exercise, you eat fruit but you also smoke your odds of surviving to 85 are 52%.
The odds of a 75 year old male who does all 4 things wrong living to 85 are 35%. If he does all 4 right his odds of living to 85 are 67%.
Also, this is just a rule of thumb I seem to have come across when researching health.
Smoking takes roughly 10 years off life expectancy. Poor diet or being sedentary takes closer to 2-5 years off. I don’t know what the combined value is for poor diet and being sedentary, but it is probably not much higher than 2-4 years (I doubt it compounds and adds up to 4-10 years for example).
This article mentions vegetarians living 3.6 years longer than meat eaters.
This claims smoking takes 10 years off life expectancy.
