APCOM

Milanese women seem not to be able giving up with cigarettes: they are, in fact, the most heavy smokers in Italy. "One Milanese woman on five smokes", says Gianni Ravasi, president of Lilt Milano (an Italian association fighting against tumors). That's why the City Council approved a new project: "Quitting smoking makes you beautiful. Beauty beats smoke 1-0". "We demonstrated - says Ravasi - that beauty passes by because of cigarettes, and that quitting is good not only for heart and lungs, but for our face too".

The projects says that quitting smoking makes our skin 13 years younger. The 75% of women involved in the experiment also lost weight when they stopped smoking. This pilot-project involved 46 women in Milano and a team of psychologists, dermatologists and nutritionists. For the first time in Italy, it helped to value not only physical, but also aesthetic benefits of quitting smoking. "Anti-smoking messages written on cigarettes packages could concern aesthetical effects too, because now we can measure them", says Manfredi Palmeri, City Council's president. "Milano's Council wants to continue informing about tobacco's bad consequences, distributing to young people informative material about visible and invisible effects of cigarettes".

It is very important to find a way to convince women quitting smoking", commented Ravasi. "In 1929 there were no women in Italy dying for lung cancer, while today we register 6.000 cases in a year. Although fewer women smoke than men, the percentage difference between the two has continued to decrease year by year". Today, with a much closer gap between men and women's smoking rates, women share a much larger burden of smoking-related disease. But stopping this phenomenon is still possible.