Smoking doesn't slim girls; stunts boys' growth.
Smoking rates in teenagers are going down, so why are teen girls still lighting up at alarming rates? Girls are using Cigarettes for weight control, according to a researcher from McGill University in Montreal.
What's More, says researcher Igor Karp, it doesn't work.
Karp's findings indicate that teenage girls gain weight at exactly the same rate whether they smoke or not. He also found 73 per cent of girls and 42 per cent of boys who took part in the study are smokers.
Joanne DiNardo with the Ontario Lung Association was not surprised, and says the myth that smoking is slimming is a clever marketing ploy, courtesy of the tobacco industry.
"I think young people are very important to the tobacco industry, because eventually the people who currently smoke will not survive, and those smokers have to be replaced," DiNardo told CTV.
The same study found that boys who smoked were More likely to be shorter and leaner.
Researchers suggest this indicates smoking cigarettes stunts growth. Girls mature faster, and tend to have already started puberty before beginning to smoke, so their growth is not inhibited in the same way.
The study followed 1,300 Montreal students. It began monitoring them at age 12 or 13, and followed them for five years.
"There is an important public-health message here that we need to get to teenage girls: Smoking cigarettes is not going to help you lose weight," said Dr. Louise Pilote, leader of the Genesis ICE team, a study group investigating sex and gender difference in cardiovascular disease.
DiNardo hopes the study changes the message that young girls hear about smoking.
"Smoking isn't glamourous," DiNardo said, "and the cigarettes industry is actually duping you. They're out to get young people. Who else is going to replace all those smokers?"
That is just One of many messages that need to be tailoRed to girls and women to improve their heart health, said Pilote.
"The bottom line is that women have poorer cardiovascular outcomes. ... There is a big body of medical literature that tells us that, but very little that tells us why. We hope to change that."
Pilote and her team presented preliminary findings on Monday in Vancouver to the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress annual meeting.
She said the teenage smoking study is One of many projects being dOne by 30 researchers affiliated with Genesis.
Past research on teen girls showed those who believed they were overweight were More likely to smoke than those who saw themselves as average or thin.
In a 1997 study, researchers from the University of Toronto administeRed questionnaires to nearly 4,000 Catholic high school students. It revealed One-third of girls consideRed themselves overweight, compaRed to 14 per cent of boys.
According to Health Canada, Canadian teenagers smoke 1.6 billion Cigarettes each year. About 25 per cent of teen smokers say they're trying to quit.
A Canadian study last summer showed that absorbing nicotine from second-hand smoke in the home may make children physically More susceptible to getting hooked on Cigarettes when they become adolescents.
The study of almost 200 Montreal school children found that the presence of a nicotine-related substance called cotinine in their saliva was a significant pRedictor of kids going on to become smokers in their teens.
Kids who had reached puberty were More likely to take up smoking than those who had not yet matuRed physically, said the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in August.
The findings were independent of such factors as sex, socio-economic status of parents, the number of adult smokers in the home or the quantity of Cigarettes they smoked.
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