octor says Obama in excellent health

Obama has a history of cigarette smoking. His doctor says Obama has quit smoking several times and is currently using Nicorette gum to break the habit.

* A regular exerciser, Obama's resting heart rate was 60 beats per minute. His blood pressure was a low 90/60 and he has a lean, muscular build with no excess body fat.

* Laboratory studies showed a low cholesterol level of 173 and an EKG heart test was normal.

(Reporting by Deborah Charles in Chicago, Editing by Sandra Maler)


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Smell's back no ifs, no butts

Mrs McLaren-Salter, a Wairarapa Hospital orthopaedic nurse specialist, quit smoking just four weeks ago, and is emphatic she will never smoke again in her life.

"I've tried more than 10 times to give up, and briefly succeeded several times before getting sucked back in," she said.

"This time it's different. I read Alan Carr's book  The Easy Way to Stop Smoking  and it's completely changed the way I think about cigarettes.

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These risks did not simply disappear when he quit smoking in February 2007. (Let me be clear, this is not an appeal to puritanical values — nor an endorsement of a candidate. This is about the long-term and sometimes irreversible consequences of smoking cigarettes.)

Yes, Obama claims to have quit — and by doing so, he did reduce his risk of smoking-related disease. But the science tells us that it is naive to think that quitting after years of smoking returns you to the state of health of a never-smoker. In fact, after enough smoking, some health effects are irreversible. How long and how much one smokes determines the extent of health risk after quitting. More than half of all lung cancers are diagnosed in ex-smokers. And it's not just lung cancer. Ex-smokers face long term risks for pancreatic, esophageal, bladder, and kidney cancers, to name a few.

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