Health

Alcohol & Smoking

Alcohol
Most of us go to College to study, but a by-product of that is alcohol - the grease that oils the wheels of student life. For your health's sake, try to avoid binge drinking and stick to your weekly maximum limits. These are 28 units for men and 21 for women. Some students drink over 50 units a week, and although it may be fun to try and keep pace, drink at your own speed and know your own limit.

Probably the best advice is to, if you must, keep tabs on your drinking daily and not exceed 3 or 4 units per day, and, very importantly, try and have a "dry" 48 hour slot every week. That'll help you recover, sober up, and keep you slightly healthier.

Smoking
"Smoking Kills". They don't put those warnings on the cigarette packets for advertising purposes, it's not some sophisticated subliminal marketing message - it's fact. There are many ways of giving up smoking, hypnotherapy, gritting your teeth or patches or gum, but none of them will work unless you convince yourself that you want to give up. OK, so smoking relaxes you, and tastes good, but that's about it on the plus side. Smoking will kill you - I wouldn't eat asbestos if it tasted good and relaxed me, so why should I smoke tar and nicotine? Plus, and this is the thing that'll swing it for you - if you smoke 20-a-day this year, it'll cost you £1,600 - which is your totality of your student loan and probably more than your entire year's rent.

If you need more convincing: an estimated 21 million people in the developed world alone died during the 90's as a result of smoking. A quarter of young people who smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day will die prematurely in middle age as a result of their smoking. In the UK an estimated 121,000 deaths a year can be attributed to smoking, and every hour 13 people die from illnesses related to smoking such as lung cancer, bronchitis, emphysema, and heart disease. Six times as many people die from smoking-related illnesses than from AIDS, suicide, drug use, murders and road accidents all put together. Smokers lose on average one day of life a week and an estimated 200 people are killed and 2000 seriously injured in fires caused by smoking.