I unfortunately know someone who is undergoing lung surgeries (yes, plural) and she is deathly ill. They attribute her condition to having been raised in a smoking family. Being around that smoke until she went off to college took its irreversible toll.

Make sure you share your tasty meal with the rest of us. :mad: I think I can stand eating about half of it until my body revolts.

Yep and there are people who still eat things like fatback and other foods that are now viewed as signs of poverty or lack of info. Some of these people live until they are 100. How healthy most of them are is a different story. As far as I'm concerned, no doctor worth her or his salt will tell us that there's a human alive who can eat carelessly all the time (especially sedentary people) without any internal and external repurcussions of some sort. Even if it's heartburn...that can end up something else eventually.

It's like the 70 year old "habitual cougher" who says "I've smoked all of my life and I'm not dead yet...nor do I have cancer...*weeze...weeze*..."

As someone who suffers from chronic lung ailments aggravated by being exposed to secondhand smoke, I call bullllsheet.

This is entirely anecdotal. I could have said that 21 of my 23 nieces and nephews were raised in smoking households and not one of them has any condition that could be construed as being caused by secondhand smoke. Neither do the spouses or the smokers themselves for that matter, some of whom are now in their mid 70s.

I could have - but I didn't. Because it's anecdotal and nothing more.

Because you're smarter than that, right?

I have asthma because of exposure to second-hand smoke growing up. While I'd love to trust the word of a proprietor of a cancer store and one of his brothers, I think I'm going to listen to a team of MDs instead.

Daemon,
No offense, but I trust information from AHA or any of those groups about as much as I trust information from studies funded by tobacco companies. They both have agendas and neither will be completly honest. I honestly try my best to find independent studies when quoting statistics...then I don't run into this problem.

As someone who has seen 3 of her family members die and 2 others almost die from the effects of smoking, I have never smoked, and I never will.

However, I am someone who has Asthma, Chronic Bronchitis, and other breathing issues because of my exprousure to second hand smoke all my life.

Also many states now have laws that outlaw smoking in any public area, including restaurants I know Cali and Florida do....