An important cause of cardiovascular disease, in addition to a high-fat, high-calorie, high-salt diet and lack of exercise, is smoking. The nicotine and carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke can harden the blood vessels. Because the binding force of carbon monoxide with hemoglobin is about 250 times greater than oxygen, the formation of carboxyhemoglobin, which can reduce the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. This leads to edema in the inner walls of the arteries, which hinders blood flow and provides conditions for cholesterol deposition, leading to atherosclerosis over time. Nicotine can cause the release of “catecholamines” from the body’s tissues, resulting in an increased heart rate and higher blood pressure. This can not only lead to high blood pressure, but also due to the increased heart rate and high blood discharge, it is easy to produce myocardial hypoxia, causing the onset of coronary heart disease. The incidence of coronary heart disease increases as the amount of smoking increases. The majority of people under the age of 60 who die from coronary heart disease are associated with smoking. As with lung cancer, death from coronary heart disease decreases with smoking cessation. It decreases significantly 1 year after quitting and is similar to that of nonsmokers after 10 to 20 years. Although the mortality rate from coronary heart disease is lower than that from lung cancer, coronary heart disease is more common than lung cancer and, therefore, causes more deaths from smoking than from lung cancer. sudden death from coronary heart disease in men under 50 years of age is primarily due to smoking.