Smoking is bad— but you already knew that.
We’re not sitting in a Mad Men board room in the 60’s fueling our misogyny with tar and rat finger nails and whatever else is in cigarettes.
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People who smoke aren’t bad people by any means, but cigarettes themselves aren’t out to be our buddies.
Apart from the obvious cancer risk, smoking causes a whole host of other issues I didn’t even know about.
Bronchitis, stroke, tooth and gum decay, pregnancy and fertility issues —I could fill an entire article with these.
According to doctors, smoking cigarettes can even cause issues “downstairs”.
Yep, smoking shrinks your penis.
Seriously!
Harley Street urologist Marc Laniado spoke to Mirror Online about the odd physical effects that smoking can have on the penis.
“To have a firm erection, you need sufficient blood flow. Smokers have a higher incidence of atherosclerosis in all blood vessels, including those in the penis, which can reduce blood flow.”
Size may not matter, but health sure matters for your size.
I knew that things like alcohol and age had an effect on erectile dysfunction, but I had no idea that smoking did.
A fair amount of the American population smokes cigarettes, so this is an issue that impacts a lot of people.
“This can be temporary or, eventually, permanent.”
Laniado also explains that smoking also affects how hard someone can get.
“The chemicals in smoke may also have an effect on firmness; nicotine causes blood vessels to become narrow.”
“Stopping blood flow stops the spontaneous and nightly erections that are needed to keep it at a good length.”
“Often they will say, ‘My erection is not so good, I don’t wake up with an erection in the morning as much as I used to or my penis isn’t quite so hard when I’m having sexual relations.'”
However, it’s not just men who could be impacted, as womens’ arousal also depends on blood flow to their bits.
Previous studies have linked cigarettes to poor sexual performance.
A study in 1998 at Boston University of Medicine examined the erect penises of 200 men and concluded that those men who were smokers didn’t have as much stretch to their ‘length’.
Certain types of medication can also affect penis size.
Drugs such as Adderall, certain anti-depressants, and prostate medications have been linked in some studies to sexual dysfunction .
You should probably stop smoking anyway, but now you have another reason.
Something tells me that you care a little more for your baby maker than you do for your lung health, which no one is judging you for.
So long as you are lowering your risk of serious illness, it doesn’t really matter why you’re doing it.
