Two-thirds of smokers report wanting to give up smoking.
The majority of smokers (58 per cent) say that it would be fairly/very difficult to go
without smoking for a whole day.
WHO DRINKS?
According to the General Household Survey (1992), men on average drank 15.9 units a
week (about eight pints of beer) and women drank about 5.4 units (about two and a half
pints of beer). About 27 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women were drinking more
than the recommended sensible amounts of alcohol which at this time were 21 units
for men and 14 units for women. These limits have now been increased to 28 for men
and 21 for women. Sex differences in drinking behaviour are shown in Figure 5.3.
HEALTH IMPLICATIONS OF SMOKING AND ALCOHOL USE
Is smoking bad for health?
Negative effects
Doll and Hill (1954) reported that smoking cigarettes was related to lung cancer. Since
then, smoking has also been implicated in coronary heart disease and a multitude
of other cancers such as throat, stomach and bowel. In addition, the increase in life
expectancy over the past 150 years is considerably less for smokers than for non-smokers
(see Chapter 2). The risks of smoking were made explicit in a book by Peto et al. (1994),
Fig. 5-2 Current smokers, ex-smokers and non-smokers by sex, 1972–92 (after General
Household Survey 1994)SMOKING AND ALCOHOL USE 101