TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) -- It was a timely lesson seniors got Wednesday morning at the Wellness Center in Tupelo.
November 15th is The Great American Smoke Out, and they found out just how harmful smoking can be to their bodies.
Something that may help them spread the word or take on the challenge.
"The Great American Smoke Out is a day that individuals who smoke or use tobacco take the information given to them and try to quit from smoking or refrain from smoking for one day," says Wellness Center Director Hank Boerner. "This is to see if in one day they were able to do it."
Boerner says taking one day off of smoking is actually what ultimately helped him quit the habit in the early 80's, but to add a little extra initiative to spread the word and have a successful smoke out, the Wellness Center brought in the big guns, or in this case lungs.
"These are actually pig lungs, and the reason why we use pig lungs is because they are very similar to human lungs," says Donna Loden with HealthWorks!. "We actually didn't get the pig with the unhealthy lungs to smoke, but what we did is order them from a laboratory. The lab actually injected them with some of the 4,000 chemicals that are actually in cigarette smoke."
Some of those chemicals include things that are in hair dye, fingernail polish remover, and even batteries.
For those who saw the lungs it wasn't a pretty sight.
"It was horrifying. I smoked, myself, and I quit 30 years ago," says Neil White. "I have two sons who still smoke, and seeing this just motivates me to go work on them, and try to get them to stop smoking. I don't want to see their lungs end up like the lungs we saw here, a blackened mess."
