At this point, nobody’s arguing that smoking is healthy. Everyone’s very aware that cigarettes have what can be called, for lack of a better term, a “horrifying” effect on your health. But new studies are showing that smoking does even more gross things to your body than researchers previously thought, particularly when it comes to women. The long and short of it is that women who smoke are 26 more times likely to die of lung cancer than those who don’t. and smoking knocks about a decade off of everyone’s projected lifespan, man or woman. But here’s the good news: it turns out that if you stop smoking before you hit 40, your body can actually gain back about 9 of those 10 years pretty quickly. “It’s a very encouraging message,” study leader Dr. Prabhat Jha says. “If you think about the average 45-year-old smoker in the United States, they probably started when they were age 15. They might be smoking for a quarter of a century. And they might think, ‘Oh, it’s too late. There’s no point for me to quit because the damage is done.’ But that’s not true” …
