Teenage Girls and Cigarettes
In the current world scenario, teenage girls are obsessed with their body figure and go to any extent to become super slim and stay thin all the time. To add fuel to the fire, there is a myth floating among the teenage girls that smoking cigarettes help in maintaining their body slim. There are many tobacco companies are increasingly capitalising on this and targeting teenage girls, using cynical marketing ploys that tap into young women’s fears about their weight, and introducing “female-friendly” packaging.
There are other tobacco companies that uses terminology like ‘super slim’ to make the link between smoking their product and losing weight. These kind of cynical advertisements catch the target audience in a jiffy. Girls anxious about their weight and desperate to stay slim get attracted to these products. Further more; there are some tobacco companies that glamorise smoking by getting celebrities to endorse their products. With famous people voting for a cigarette, marketing the product becomes easy since the teenage girls fall for them.
Many tobacco companies have tried to forge a link between smoking and slimness. The first ad which emphasised the “benefits” of smoking for weight control was brought out in the late 1920s, with the slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”. The popular US brand Virginia Slims hammers the message home with varieties Virginia Slims Super Slims Lights and Virginia Slims Super Slims Ultra Lights.
Coming to the actual facts, teen smokers are more likely to experience obesity as adults, according to a new study from Finland. Girls who smoke 10 cigarettes per day or more are at greatest risk, particularly for abdominal obesity. Their waist sizes are 1.34 inches larger than non-smoker’s waists are as young adults, according to the study.
Scientists know a correlation exists between women’s weight and smoking, the young women who smoked more than 10 cigarettes per day were 2.32 times more likely to become overweight than non-smokers, according to the study. The difference could be either biological or cultural. Biologically, it might be that tobacco and gender specific hormones interact differently in girls and boys in ways that affect appetite and fat distribution.
There are also teenage girls who smoke for just the pleasure of it or blame it on the stress factor. However, majority of teenage girls smoke primarily for wait loss .This is not a solution for people to loose weight. Smoking is a very harmful habit and has a lot of after effects on the human body. It is time that girls who are very young and smoke realise that it is just a false theory of smoking in aid of weight reduction and quit smoking at the earliest.