I never smoked. Oh I puffed on probably three cigarettes over the course of my life and in my callow youth I would occasionally light up a cigar. But I was always very leery of getting hooked. This was due in no small part to my dad who was a smoker until about eight or nine years ago; during my childhood he told me repeatedly that he didn’t want to smoke but that he was addicted and that he wished he’d never started. That left an impression on me and since I didn’t want all of the health risks of smoking like lung cancer and heart disease I figured it was a bad idea to start.

Alas not all kids are like me. Some actually start smoking and some continue to smoke into adulthood. How to scare kids into not smoking is a perennial topic never mind that we’ve pretty much won that battle. Now Finnish researchers have a new weapon in the war on smoking: shame.

No not shame of smoking — silly! No the researchers suggest fat shaming! Because no matter the behavior it’s always a good idea to threaten that it will make you fat in the end:

Telling teenage would-be smokers that lighting up may make them fat down the road may be a more effective deterrent than harping on the risks of heart disease and cancer from smoking hints research published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Well this must be a study of teens’ attitudes about smoking and fat right? Of course not — the study doesn’t appear to say anything about whether telling teens they’ll gain weight if they smoke is a more effective deterrent than telling teens they’ll die of lung cancer. I suspect that’s because it isn’t a bigger deterrent.

But at least the study shows that there’s a serious weight gain involved right?

In a study Finnish researchers found that smoking during adolescence strongly predicted the development of abdominal obesity in adulthood among both men and women.

In particular they found that girls who smoked at least 10 cigarettes daily during adolescence had a 3.4-centimeter larger waistline as young adults on average than did girls who had never smoked.

3.4 whole centimeters? Shocking! That’s almost one and one-third inches! Why ex-smokers must weigh five or six pounds more than non-smokers!

[…]

“And most interesting” said Saarni the apparent link between smoking during adolescence and being heavy later on was independent of the young person’s own body weight — meaning that those who were heavy smokers had greater waist circumference even within the same body mass index (BMI) levels as their non-smokers peers.

Oh crikey can we just stop now? Guess what — ex-smokers have a tendency to gain some weight. That’s due to a lot of things — nicotine is a mild stimulant ex-smokers often eat a bit more to replace the behavior of sucking on a cigarette whatever — but it’s not exactly a news flash. My dad gained some weight when he quit smoking; so what? He also avoided going down the path of my grandpa who died of lung cancer. I think he made the right choice.