Smoking

Sure, smoking is bad for you -- but what happens when you combine it with something really good -- like running eight miles a day? Do you get a healthier smoker? Or an unhealthy athlete? It's one of those is-the-cigarette-half-smoked-or-half-unsmoked conundrums. And there's no definitive answer. "If people can quit, that's the best thing," says Dr. Robert Sallis, director of sports medicine at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fontana.

They've been coming to Urartu Coffee for months, and every day it's the same. They sit. They sip. They smoke. It's hard to explain, the men say -- there's just something about the taste of tar joining java. But Jack Kakoyan, 28, and his friends may soon stop meeting at their usual table, where they spend hours socializing in the sun.

The nation's war on smoking is faltering because, while overall tobacco use is dropping, the number of people who quit is being largely offset by the recruitment of 3,000 new smokers per day--most of them young. And as this is happening, a series of government research reports to be published today finds, the demographics of smoking are undergoing vast change and, by the turn of the century, tobacco use is expected to become overwhelmingly a habit of the poorly educated.

After declining for seven years, national smoking rates have remained steady at nearly 21% from 2004 to 2006, prompting concern among federal health officials that progress in curtailing smoking has stalled. The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that reduced spending on anti-tobacco campaigns and bigger marketing budgets from cigarette companies appeared to be the reasons for the leveling off.

Forbidden to light up at work, in movie theaters and some of her favorite restaurants, Sandy Tilman has long savored smoking on her Friday nights bowling here at Regal Lanes, where she could enjoy the company of friends and puff away without feeling like a leper. "That's the last place we have left to go for a night out to socialize," said the 43-year-old Orange resident, adding that she does not frequent taverns.

Smokers in Los Angeles lost another refuge Wednesday when the City Council unanimously approved a ban on lighting up in outdoor cafes, food courts and around the city's ubiquitous mobile food trucks. With the move, city officials are following the lead of municipalities across California, including Burbank, Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Santa Monica, which already ban smoking in outdoor dining areas. California law bars smoking inside restaurants and bars. The ordinance prohibits smoking within 10 feet of outdoor dining areas and within 40 feet of mobile food trucks.

One OF the biggest secrets of the fitness world has nothing to do with supplements, steroids or spandex. It is the almost implausible combination of exercise and smoking. There are people, it seems, who do both. We're not talking about mall walkers who light up once a week. These are men and women who compete in marathons and triathlons and go hiking and train at the gym -- who also have a pretty steady cigarette habit.

Lighting up on the outdoor patios of cafes and coffee shops may soon be a thing of the past in Los Angeles. The city's arts and parks committee took a first step Wednesday toward a new ban on smoking on restaurant patios or within 10 feet of any outdoor establishment that serves food or beverages. Bars with outdoor areas and other over-18 venues would be exempt.

When the City Council of this San Francisco suburb voted to consider what could be the most stringent tobacco regulation in America, anti-smoking activists cheered. Banning smoking everywhere but single-family detached homes and their yards would be a big step forward, even in health-conscious California. Then the blogosphere erupted. Side-by-side portraits of Councilwoman Coralin Feierbach and Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler were posted on a smoking-rights website.

Want to put away the cigarettes and talk with some interesting people? Go to a hookah bar, says Aaron Alu, as he takes a leisurely puff from a glass water pipe at the Mirage Coffeehouse and Hookah Lounge in Long Beach. Apple-scented smoke drifts in the air as the clean-cut police officer looks around genially. "I get to talk to people here that I otherwise wouldn't ever get to know." One patron looks up from her laptop and nods in agreement.

Smokers in Los Angeles lost another refuge Wednesday when the City Council unanimously approved a ban on lighting up in outdoor cafes, food courts and around the city's ubiquitous mobile food trucks. With the move, city officials are following the lead of municipalities across California, including Burbank, Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Santa Monica, which already ban smoking in outdoor dining areas. California law bars smoking inside restaurants and bars. The ordinance prohibits smoking within 10 feet of outdoor dining areas and within 40 feet of mobile food trucks.

Smokers in Los Angeles lost another refuge Wednesday when the City Council unanimously approved a ban on lighting up in outdoor cafes, food courts and around the city's ubiquitous mobile food trucks. With the move, city officials are following the lead of municipalities across California, including Burbank, Beverly Hills, Calabasas and Santa Monica, which already ban smoking in outdoor dining areas. California law bars smoking inside restaurants and bars. The ordinance prohibits smoking within 10 feet of outdoor dining areas and within 40 feet of mobile food trucks.

The Paragon Theatre's artistic director, Warren Sherrill, has thought about staging "Agnes of God" for a while. Problem is, one of the key characters is a psychiatrist who chain-smokes. And in Colorado -- one of 25 states with indoor smoking bans -- actors can't light up on stage. The state Supreme Court last month found the 2006 smoking restriction constitutional, rejecting theater companies' argument that it infringed on their freedom of speech and stifled artistic expression.

Smoking raises the risk of diabetes, but new research indicates that -- at least in the short term -- kicking the habit increases the risk even more. The problem is not really quitting smoking. It's the pounds most people pack on when they give up cigarettes, researchers reported Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Smokers who plan to quit should be very careful not to start eating more and thus gain weight, said epidemiologist Hsin-Chieh "Jessica" Yeh of Johns Hopkins University, the lead author of the study.

The changing face of the Old Dominion can be seen in the stuff Jimmy Cirrito sweeps up off the floor of his bar every night. It used to be cigarette butts -- now it's gum. "I got Nicorette and Bubblicious and green and yellow and purple. It looks like a circus down there," said Cirrito, owner of Jimmy's Old Town Tavern in the northern Virginia suburb of Herndon, where patrons once smoked so much they burned holes in the curtains. Now they chew to fight the urge. It's been one month since Virginia became the first Southern state to ban smoking in bars and restaurants.

ABBA, others in rock hall The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is opening its arms to welcome in ABBA, Genesis, the Hollies, the Stooges and Jimmy Cliff, but has given the KISS-off, for this year at least, to hard rock's most celebrated tongue-wagging, makeup-loving band. The Cleveland-based rock hall announced the 2010 inductees Tuesday. Its 25th annual induction ceremony will be held March 15 in New York City. Veteran music mogul David Geffen also will enter the hall as a non-performer, along with two of the Brill Building's most celebrated songwriting teams, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

For most people, the holiday season means spending time with friends and family. We invite them to our Thanksgiving table. We send them cards. We kiss them under the stars to usher in the new year. But we also get angry at them, deal with their demands and endure their opinions of one another. Amid all this stress, we may be tempted to abandon some of our friends or disconnect from some of our family. But that would be a mistake. We need our connections, good and bad. Every one of them.

They've been coming to Urartu Coffee for months, and every day it's the same. They sit. They sip. They smoke. It's hard to explain, the men say -- there's just something about the taste of tar joining java. But Jack Kakoyan, 28, and his friends may soon stop meeting at their usual table, where they spend hours socializing in the sun.

Pop quiz for teenagers: Are you more likely to die from smoking more than 10 cigarettes a day or from being obese? According to a new study from the British Medical Journal, it's a tie. Swedish researchers studied health records of 45,920 men drafted by the Swedish army in 1969-70 at an average age of 18 years, 8 months. Then they consulted Sweden's national cause of death registry and found that 2,897 had died as of Sept. 1, 2007.

A good friend of mine was approaching her 49th birthday with trepidation. Why, I asked her, was she so afraid of 49? "My mother died at 49 of a heart attack. The same thing will probably happen to me," she said. Not likely, I replied. And we started to talk about her mother. Her mother was a child of the age before genetics, before cholesterol, before we knew the dangers of smoking, fat and salt. Her mother and her mother's mother cooked with bacon grease, lard and other ingredients that many of us eschew today.