Why does smoking increase my risk of cardiovascular disease?

Why does smoking increase my risk of cardiovascular disease? The main problem with smoking cigarettes or tobacco is the chemicals that are found in those. So smoking makes the walls of the arteries in your body quite sticky and that will allow fatty material to stick to them. When that happens we can develop narrowings in those blood vessels And as we previously discussed, they can get clogged and lead to things like heart attacks if those vessels are in the heart or strokes where those vessels are in the brain. So the chemicals involved, there are two main ones which are important to talk about. The first is carbon monoxide. So this is a poisonous gas when it's breathed in from smoking a cigarette. It prevents the cells in your body from carrying oxygen around the body as well as they should do. And so having high levels of carbon monoxide in the blood increases your risk of having heart or cardiovascular disease because of a chronic lack of oxygenation of the blood. The second substance in cigarettes which is dangerous is nicotine and this is what makes cigarettes and e-cigarette products addictive. Well nicotines increases your heart rate and increases your blood pressure and untreated high blood pressure as we've discussed hypertension can permanently damage the blood vessels of the heart and other areas of the body. So there's significant benefits in quitting smoking. So you know in the short term 20 minutes to half an hour after you quit smoking or stop smoking your heart rate and blood pressure will return back to normal. After a few days your sense of smell and your taste will improve and after 2 to sort of 12 weeks exercise will become a bit easier and your breathing will improve and actually only after one year of stopping smoking your risk of having a heart attack is half that of someone who's continued to smoke.