Young Britons More Likely To Take Up Smoking Thanks To Movies

Children in England see much more smoking in movies compared to their counterparts in the US and are more likely to pick up the habit as a result, finds research published in Tobacco Control.

The UK film classification system, which rates more films as suitable for young people than its US counterpart, is to blame, say the authors.

The research team assessed the number of on-screen smoking/tobacco occurrences in 572 top grossing films in the UK, which included 546 screened in the US plus 26 high earning films released only in the UK.

Because 79% of the films rated only for adults in the US ('R') were classified as suitable for young people in the UK, this meant that young Britons were exposed to 28% more smoking impressions in '15' or '12A' rated movies than their US peers, calculate the authors.



Young Britons More Likely To Take Up Smoking Thanks To Movies

Secondhand smoke raises risk of hardened arteries among teenagers

Frequent exposure to environmental tobacco smoke among 13-year-olds is associated with an increased risk of future blood vessel hardening and greater risks of other heart disease factors, according to new research published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a journal of the American Heart Association.

"Although previous research has found that passive smoke may be harmful for blood vessels among adults, we did not know until this study that these specific effects also happen among children and adolescents," said Katariina Kallio, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study and research fellow at the Research Centre of Applied and Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku in Turku, Finland.

"These findings suggest that children should not face exposure to tobacco smoke at all," Kallio said. "Even a little exposure to tobacco smoke may be harmful for blood vessels. We need to provide children a smoke-free environment." [full story]

Nicotine replacement therapy is over-promoted since most ex-smokers quit unassisted

Health authorities should emphasize the positive message that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, despite the promotion of cessation drugs by pharmaceutical companies and many tobacco control advocates.The dominant messages about smoking cessation contained in most tobacco control campaigns, which emphasize that serious attempts at quitting smoking must be pharmacologically or professionally mediated, are critiqued in an essay in this week's PLoS Medicine by Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Australia. This overemphasis on quit methods like nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has led to the "medicalisation of smoking cessation," despite good evidence that the most successful method used by most ex-smokers is quitting "cold turkey" or reducing-then-quitting. Reviewing 511 studies published in 2007 and 2008 the authors report that studies repeatedly show that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided and most ex-smokers report that cessation was less difficult than expected. The medicalisation of smoking cessation is fuelled by the extent and influence of pharmaceutical support for cessation intervention studies, say the authors. They cite a recent review of randomized controlled trials of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) that found that 51% of industry-funded trials reported significant cessation effects, while only 22% of non-industry trials did. Many assisted cessation studies—but few if any unassisted cessation studies—involve researchers who declare support from a pharmaceutical company manufacturing cessation products.


The authors conclude that "public sector communicators should be encouraged to redress the overwhelming dominance of assisted cessation in public awareness, so that some balance can restored in smokers' minds regarding the contribution that assisted and unassisted smoking cessation approaches can make to helping them quit smoking."

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Absolutely spot-on, but as we know, so-called NRT is just a way for the nicotine industry to make more money, and that nicotine industry now includes pharmaceuticals as well as tobacco companies.