Please understand that I am not pushing heavy smoking, or even any smoking.

If all those well-meaning, and not so well-meaning, activists would put the same effort into promoting the regular eating of whole, healthful, individually-appropriate, homecooked food, tobacco or lack thereof would not be an issue at all.

You can stop smoking, yet keep eating fast foods (in your home), heavily processed non-foods and fast foods outside the home. And I am saying that probably this description fits most folks who have somehow managed to stop smoking. But because of the poor diet (and probably a whole range of drugs of all kinds) your health will continue to break down. Thirty years later, you "get" cancer and say, oh, that's because it takes lung cancer 30 years to incubate and manifest. What a load of hogwash.

If along with smoking cessation you clean up the rest of your life also, then you can act shocked if decades later cancer of the lung shows up. To stop smoking alone means virtually nothing, except your clothes and home won't smell bad. But if you place other forms of junk into your body, don't expect good results.

All the exsmokers I know eat poorly. There's more to health than just foregoing tobacco.