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Smoking Alters Your Immune System for Years After You Quit
Cigarettes may shape your immune system just as much as aging, and appear to have a long-lasting effect by switching on and turning off genes.
Giving up smoking brings the inflammatory response back to where it would have been without cigarettes, but smoking-related epigenetic changes may be tougher to reverse, suspects Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester. Moving forward, Tsang hopes that future studies run specific experiments to test some of these associations in the lab, to dig into how our environment and behavior shapes our immune system. In the meantime, Cruickshank says, the best way to keep your immune system healthy is to follow the basic advice you’ve probably been told a thousand times: eat a varied, minimally processed diet; move your body; destress; and get plenty of sleep.
Or read this on Wired