New Study Reveals Dangers of Smoking a Single Cigarette

It's no secret that smoking is bad for your health. Over the past few decades, medical experts have confirmed the harmful effects of this bad habit, linking it to more than 480,000 deaths per year -- and that's only in the United States. As a result, some people have cut down to smoking to just a single cigarette per day, believing it won't harm their health. But there's new evidence suggesting that even a single cigarette can cause harm.

Researchers from the University of College London, U.K. found that smokers who reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked to just one per day only experienced a minor reduction of heart disease risk than their counterparts who smoked one to two packs per day.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from several existing health studies on smoking, some of which dated back to the mid-1940s. Researchers specifically looked at the number of cigarettes people smoked and health factors like heart disease. After analyzing the results, researchers concluded that men who smoked a single cigarette per day were almost 50% more likely to develop heart disease than non-smoking men. However, men who smoked 20 cigarettes per day -- a full pack -- were about 100% more likely to develop heart disease, meaning smoking a pack a day doubled their risk of heart disease.

While those numbers are certainly alarming, the results were even greater among men. Researchers found that women who smoked a single cigarette per day were 57% more likely to develop heart disease than their non-smoking counterparts, and women who smoked 20 cigarettes per day were 280% more likely to develop heart disease.

Based on these findings, researchers concluded that there is no safe level of cigarette smoking. Whether you smoke one cigarette, 20 or 40 per day, it's going to take a toll on your body, thereby increasing your risk of heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes and many other diseases.

“We have shown that a large proportion of the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke comes from smoking only a few cigarettes,” wrote the study's researchers. "This has important consequences for smokers who believe that light smoking carries little or no harm."

The bottom line is that you shouldn't smoke. As revealed here, smoking even a single cigarette per day will take a toll on your health in more ways than one. But kicking this habit isn't easy, as countless people struggle to stop smoking. There are resources available to help smokers kick the habit, however, including the government-sponsored website Smokefree.gov.

This study was published in the British Medical Journal.