Smoking - a ‘‘Killing Me Softly’’ Habit

As you may already know, moderate exercise, a healthy diet and enough rest periods influence our glycans and benefit our bodies on a molecular level. There is yet another big thing when it comes to our health — smoking.

In the last few years, anti-smoking propaganda has been stronger than ever. Commercials, billboards, even cigarette packages contain anti-smoking messages in the form of all the downsides that smoking brings. It is a great way of getting people to realise that smoking does nothing but bad things to our bodies. How does smoking influence glycans and how does this bad habit reflect on your biological age?

Multiple studies have explored how smoking influences glycan changes. Knežević et al discovered that the number of cigarettes smoked per day correlates with proinflammatory changes of glycans. An individual's glycan profile will change for the worse the more cigarettes consumed per day. It's also important to mention that smoking heavily influences the health of passive smokers — people that are involuntary inhaling smoke from other people's cigarettes. Newest paper from Pavić et al discovered that active smokers have the same profile of changes as people with inflammatory diseases (an increase of high branched structures, a decrease of low branched structures, a decrease of core fucose); they've also noticed these serious changes in ex-smokers but of a lesser magnitude. All of the above-mentioned glycan changes fit well with the theory of so-called smoking-related inflammation. But it is important to mention that discovered changes could also be a result of a decreased concentration of immunoglobulin G in smokers, which is one of the reasons why the immune response of tobacco users may be suppressed. Vasseur et al and Arnold et al wanted to see how glycans change in smokers that unfortunately developed lung cancer. They also noticed the same profile of changes and once again strengthened the negative relationship between smoking, inflammation and immune response suppression.

Proinflammatory changes in glycan profile increase our biological age and we can conclude the same with smoking. Smoking is slowly poisoning you and everyone around you meanwhile making you look older from the outside and inside. Bad effects of smoking can not only be seen on our teeth, nails, skin, hair and our overall physiological state but can also be measured using our GlycanAge test. GlycanAge test measures your glycans to tell your biological age which is a likeness of your lifestyle choices. This means you can feel good and look good while your body is deteriorating from within. Biological age measured by our GlycanAge test will be a real wake-up call for cigarette users.