No, science doesn’t suddenly advocate smoking.
But a recent study executed by Rice biochemist John Olson and collaborators from Germany and France found a rare person who found actually benefits from smoking.
A 20-something-year-old woman, diagnosed with anemia, couldn’t understand why she had the condition while her father, who is a smoker, did not.
It turns out that the two share a mutation in the gene that encodes hemoglobin, an important protein in red blood cells that delivers oxygen to cells in the body. The mutation was at the root of her anemia, but didn’t affect her father because of all the carbon monoxide he had been inhaling from his vice.
In Olson’s words, the smoker “may never be an athlete because his blood can’t carry as much oxygen, but smoking has prevented him from being anemic….And there’s a side benefit.
“People with this trait are more resistant to carbon monoxide poisoning.”
Read the full study, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, here. Just to set the other 99.9 percent of the record straight on the health effects of smoking, watch the video below.
—RealClearLife
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