Smoking will kill 1 in 3 young men in China

China will lose a third of its young men to smoking, according to devastating numbers reported by the British medical journal The Lancet. Researchers at Oxford University, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Chinese Center for Disease Control worked on two different and geographically diverse studies 15 years apart, with hundreds of thousands of participants, to get their results. The findings revealed that smoking deaths in China are set to triple by 2050 to 3 million people a year — a population larger than the entire city of Chicago.

Smoking rates in the United States have halved in the past 50 years, and one in five deaths in the U.S. are linked to the habit. The decline in the States is in part due to aggressive anti-smoking public service campaigns that aren't as common in China, where "the belief that protective biological mechanisms specific to Asian populations make smoking less hazardous, that it is easy to quit smoking, and that tobacco use is an intrinsic and ancient part of Chinese culture" are widely accepted as true, the study reports. Half of the adults interviewed were unaware that smoking can cause strokes or heart disease; only 10 percent of Chinese smokers quit by choice.

The study additionally found that men who start smoking before age 20 had twice the mortality rate of non-smokers, and that for the two-thirds of Chinese men who take up smoking, half of them will die as a result. Women in China smoke significantly less than men, the BBC reports, with only 2.4 percent taking up the habit, as compared to more than half of Chinese men.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It will be no surprise at this point to hear that China is also the largest consumer of cigarettes in the world, with the average smoker lighting up 22 times a day. Read more about the findings in The Lancet.