The cinematic portrayal of smoking sends an unhealthy message to youth

Melissa Stoneham writes:

Smoking in Hollywood movies is a known risk factor for teen smoking in the USA and Europe.

For many years, tobacco companies paid studios to have their products appear in movies. Even though this practice is no longer allowed, movies for young people and even some movies for children may include images of characters using tobacco.

These images are powerful because they can make smoking seem like a normal, acceptable or even attractive activity. Young people may also look up to movie stars, both on and off screen, and may want to imitate behaviours.

Despite the banning of tobacco companies paying to display their wares on the big screen, a recently published American study found that in 2011, the top box office films showed more onscreen smoking than the prior year, reversing five years of steady progress in reducing tobacco imagery in movies.

This study found that the 134 top-grossing films of 2011 depicted nearly 1 900 tobacco “incidents” (an incident is defined as one use or implied use – such as a lit cigarette –  of a tobacco product by an actor).

Total tobacco incidents per movie rose 7 percent from 2010 to 2011. Among movies rated G, PG or PG-13, smoking incidents per movie soared by 36 percent.

So let’s look at what is happening within the movie industry in India. India is the world’s largest producer of movies and produces more than 1000 movies a year in several languages.

Bollywood represents the Indian Hindi movie industry, and the worldwide viewership for their movies is estimated to be about 3 million. Bollywood movie stars in India are public figures, have large fan followings and exercise tremendous influence on the behavioural attitudes of adolescents.

A study titled “Tobacco use in Bollywood movies, tobacco promotional activities and their association with tobacco use among Indian adolescents” published recently in the journal, Tobacco Control, explored the relation between watching tobacco use in Bollywood movies and tobacco use among Indian adolescents.

The findings of the study, whose lead author is Dr Monika Arora, Head, Health Promotion and Tobacco Control, Public Health Foundation of India, confirmed that watching tobacco use in Bollywood movies and receptivity to tobacco promotional activities were both independently associated with tobacco use among adolescents in India.

The study used a cross-sectional sample of just under 4000 adolescent students (aged 12-16 years) from 12 schools selected randomly across New Delhi in 2009. The students were surveyed to assess the current and ever tobacco use status, receptivity to tobacco promotions (based on owning or being willing to wear tobacco-branded merchandise) and exposure to tobacco use in movies.

Perhaps you smoke to cope with stress or when you’re lonely or bored. It’s also likely that tobacco has become a part of your daily ritual. Maybe you always have a cigarette with your coffee or after a meal.

If this is true for you, quitting will be not only about handling nicotine withdrawal but also about finding other ways to reduce stress, build new routines, and get emotional support without tobacco.

Starting with small steps can increase your confidence and make it easier to quit when the time is right. The more prepared you are, the better your chances for success.

“The risks are cumulative,” said David Batty, who worked on the new study at University College London. “If you smoke across a life course, you’re at much higher risk than if you just smoked around the college years,” he told Reuters Health.

“The positive message is, it’s never too late to stop.”

Past research has linked early smoking to future heart disease and cancer. But those studies relied on middle-aged people remembering if and how much they smoked when they were younger – which isn’t always a reliable technique, researchers said.

Instead, Batty and his colleagues used data from an ongoing study of men who started college at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts between 1916 and 1950 and reported their cigarette use on school health exams.

They were then sent follow-up surveys related to smoking in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

The new study included over 28,000 men, about 10,000 of whom reported smoking as undergrads. Almost half of the participants died during an average follow-up of 53 years.

Men who reported smoking on both their college physical and follow-up questionnaires were twice as likely to die as those who never smoked. In comparison, Harvard alums who smoked as teenagers but then quit were at a 29-percent increased risk of early death.

Risks were higher for smoking-related cancers and heart disease, in particular.

“The good news is, for people who are able to quit, this is going to have profound effects on their health,” said Dr. Michael Siegel, a tobacco control researcher from the Boston University School of Public Health.

“For people who did quit smoking during the follow-up period, their risk of death dropped greatly. It doesn’t quite go back to (non-smokers’ risk), but it is significantly less,” Siegel, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

But, he added, the study also “shows the tremendous negative consequences if we don’t get people to quit.”

Siegel emphasized the importance of quit call lines as well as anti-smoking media campaigns.

“We can’t lose sight of all the current smokers out there and the fact that smoking cessation rates are really very low,” he said. About three percent of smokers quit every year, Siegel said.

In the study, published online Sept. 4 in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, scientists at Brown University found that young people who are new smokers suffer nearly all of the same negative psychological effects when they try to quit as people who’ve smoked for years.

Unlike adults trying to quit, however, teens aren’t irritated by certain sounds and they are still able to feel happy. The study authors suggested their findings could help improve programs designed to help people stop smoking.

“Adolescents are showing — even relatively early in the dependence process — significant, strong, negative effects just after acute abstinence from smoking,” study lead author L. Cinnamon Bidwell, assistant professor (research) in psychiatry and human behavior at Brown’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, said in a university news release. “Our study shows what those specific effects are. We chose a broad array” of factors to study.

The study involved 96 teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 19. The teens were divided into three groups: 22 nonsmokers, 27 smokers who did not change their habit, and 47 smokers who avoided cigarettes for almost a full day. The researchers noted that the teen smokers had about nine cigarettes each day for about two years.

The teens who quit for one day had their expired carbon monoxide levels measured once before they stopped smoking and again after they stopped to confirm they did not have a cigarette. After not smoking, the study revealed these teens experienced the same withdrawal symptoms, smoking urges, negative mood swings and intense cravings as those recorded in adults.

“In terms of the subjective negative reactions and the urge reactions, their patterns look remarkably similar to adults,” senior author Suzanne Colby, associate professor (research) in psychiatry and human behavior at the center, explained in the news release. “That is really interesting because they are smoking fewer cigarettes per day and they’ve just been smokers for a shorter period of time.”

The study also found the teens felt cravings for cigarettes even when not “provoked” with obvious triggers such as showing them a lit cigarette.

“They came in and their craving and negative affect were already high,” Colby said.

The teen smokers also had a stronger reaction to smoking-specific cues than their peers, according to the researchers, who suggested their findings could make smoking cessation programs targeting teens more effective.

The findings “point to withdrawal, urge . . . and negative affect” (mood) as possible treatment targets in teens, and suggest that future studies of teen smoking should look at these factors, the study authors concluded.

Researchers whose work appeared in the journal Addiction Biology found that of nearly 1,100 smokers surveyed, 17 percent got fewer than six hours of sleep each night and 28 percent reported “disturbed” sleep quality.

That compared with rates of seven percent and 19 percent respectively among more than 1,200 non-smokers who were also surveyed, said lead researcher Stefan Cohrs, of Charite Berlin medical school in Germany.

“This study demonstrates for the first time an elevated prevalence of sleep disturbance in smokers compared with non-smokers in a population without lifetime history of psychiatric disorders even after controlling for potentially relevant risk factors,” Cohrs and his colleagues wrote.

The findings cannot prove that smoking directly impairs sleep, since smokers may have other habits that could affect their shut-eye such as staying up late to watch TV or getting little exercise, Cohrs told Reuters Health in an email.

But there is also reason to believe the stimulating effects of nicotine may be to blame.

“If you smoke and you do suffer from sleep problems, it is another good reason to quit smoking,” Cohrs said.

Poor sleep quality may not only make your waking hours tougher. Some studies have also linked habitually poor sleep to health problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

The study included 1,071 smokers and 1,243 non-smokers who were free of mental health disorders, since those conditions may make a person both more likely to smoke and more vulnerable to sleep problems.

The researchers used a questionnaire that gauges sleep quality. Overall, more than one-quarter of smokers had a score than landed them in the category of “disturbed” sleep, meaning they had a high probability of insomnia.

Many things can affect sleep quality, and Cohrs’s team was able to account for factors such as age, weight, and alcohol abuse. Yet smoking was still linked to poorer sleep quality.

It’s still possible there are other things about smokers that impair their sleep, but Cohrs said he thinks the most likely culprit is nicotine – and the prospect of better sleep could provide smokers with an additional reason to quit.

Parents may think their children are exposed only if they’re around someone actively smoking a cigarette, or are unaware of where else their children may be breathing in smoke – but a blood test may help identify and reduce smoke exposure, said researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

Secondhand smoke exposure in children has been tied to sudden infant death syndrome, respiratory problems, ear infections and asthma.

“What the test does is allow the doctor, in consultation with the parent, to figure out the source of exposure and then to eliminate it,” said Jonathan Winickoff, an associate professor of pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston.

Winickoff, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the study in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, told Reuters Health the test can also identify if a child is being exposed to smoke without the parent realizing it, such as by living in an apartment building where smoking is allowed.

The researchers tested 496 blood samples left over from children, most aged one to four, to determine how many of them were exposed to secondhand smoke. The blood samples were initially taken at San Francisco General Hospital to test for lead exposure between November 2009 and March 2010.

The researchers tested the blood for cotinine, a chemical produced by the body after it is exposed to nicotine.

Overall, 55 percent of the blood samples had a measurable amount of cotinine, which meant those children had been exposed to smoke within the previous three to four days.

Only 13 percent of parents, however, admitted that their child had been exposed to secondhand smoke.

“I think parents do not understand the various sources of potential exposure,” said Neal Benowitz, one of the study’s co-authors.

The researchers reported that some parents may also believe a child has to be around someone who is smoking to be exposed – but that is not the case.

For example, children still get the effects of secondhand smoke if they spend time in a room where someone recently smoked.

Benowitz and his colleagues said testing children for cotinine could ultimately prevent diseases brought on by secondhand smoke exposure by helping detect the source.

“Once you know there is exposure then you can talk to the parent,” he added.

Testing for cotinine is currently not readily available to the general public, but Winickoff said the best approach would be to integrate cotinine testing with routine testing for lead.

And so a ballot measure that discourages smoking would be a good thing, right? And if it also raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research that might cure cancer, that would be good, too, right?

Not if you believe the blather being promulgated by the tobacco industry.

The misleading, disingenuous, lying media blitz paid for by Big Tobacco’s $40 million campaign chest asserts or suggests:

– The money won’t go to cancer treatment. That wasn’t what this measure was designed to do – the funds would go toward cancer research, which is where cancer treatments are found. We don’t have a cure for cancer yet – where do opponents think that will come from?

– Somehow, all the research money will go out of state. Since California is home to 10 research facilities recognized by the National Cancer Institute as some of the best in the world, and the program will be run largely by California physicians and educators, where do they think the research funds will go – Tennessee?

– The medical community is against it – according to Dr. La Donna Porter, who shows up in television commercials in a white coat. Well, the powerful California Medical Association, along with most other medical groups, is in favor of it. And it turns out Porter is a known rent-a-doctor who shills for all kinds of spurious causes, such as the chemical industry’s defense of perchlorate, a toxic substance that is especially harmful to children. (It’s not clear whether she’s being paid for her efforts.)

– The money raised won’t “support other programs.” This one is mostly true, but why should it? The idea here is to try to cure cancer.

And it will get worse. A new TV ad features an actor portraying a scientist in a lab coat. It says the proposition will “divert money from our schools.” How? It doesn’t divert money from anybody – except smokers.

This page already has endorsed Proposition 29, which would raise the tax on a pack of smokes by $1 to pay for cancer research. And studies have shown that increasing the cost of cigarettes sharply reduces the consumption of this deadly product, which would be a welcome side-effect. What’s not to like?

But the misinformation that continues to spew from the measure’s opponents can’t go unchallenged. Misleading voters is a common trait of political advertising by giant corporations that have $40 million to spend.

This is not an income tax. It is not a general sales tax. It’s a tax that would save lives.

Don’t want to pay a tax on cigarettes? Don’t buy cigarettes.

And don’t believe all the claims by an industry selling a product that, when used correctly, will kill you.

Source: sfgate

Smoking Art Gallery

creative-smoking-ads-suicide

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 16

Smoking Kills

Anti-Smoking Campaign

Australian Quit Smoking Commercial

Malaysian Anti Smoking Commercial

Features:
- Display Quit statistics
- Display Extra Life you gained!
- Extended body health statistics
- Calculate statistics in either U.S. or Euro

Download at MobiGeni.com