National No Smoking Day

No Smoking Day is an annual health awareness day which is intended to help smokers quit. The first No Smoking Day was on Ash Wednesday in 1984, and it now takes place on the second Wednesday in March. Use their hashtag #TellUsYourWay to post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and make a statement about how you're going to quit smoking this No Smoking Day. If you're a smoker, stopping smoking is the single most important step you can take to protect the health of your heart, and the good news is that the risk to your heart health decreases significantly soon after you stop. 3,000 smokers a day are admitted to hospital & it’s estimated that smoking related illness could account for nearly 500k admissions a year.

EverythingBranded does Carbon monoxide breath testing

We put some of our EB members who identify as smokers to the test, to see just how clean their lungs were.

When you smoke, carbon monoxide (a poisonous gas) replaces some of the oxygen in your blood. The CO test is simply an easy and noninvasive one. Participants blow into a hand-held machine, called a CO monitor, which measures the level of CO in your body. The more CO you have inhaled, the higher your CO reading will be - in other words, the more smoke you have inhaled, the more CO you will have in your body.

This test can also show whether you’re inhaling harmful amounts of secondhand smoke. If you see the results of the CO test, the reading is measured in COppm, which means the number of CO molecules in one million parts of air. Women with a CO test reading of 3ppm or higher may be referred to stop smoking services. When you stop smoking, your CO readings will fall showing that your body is becoming free from this poisonous gas. If your reading is high and you do not smoke, you might be at risk of CO poisoning from a faulty appliance and you should call the Health and Safety Executive gas safety line.