The statistics today with respect to cigarette smoking are not in dispute. Smokers are more likely than nonsmokers to develop heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer. Smoking is estimated to increase the risk of lung cancer by 25 times.6
So what the adversary portrayed as fashionable, sophisticated, and fun has in fact resulted in misery and untimely death for millions of people.
Alcohol is another example. Over many years I have followed a research project that commenced in the 1940s. Initially, 268 men attending Harvard University were periodically studied over their entire lives. Later, others, including women, became part of the study. The goal of the original study was to find out about success and happiness.
This study contains three significant insights. First, adult happiness has a high correlation with childhood familyhappiness, especially love and affection from parents.7Second is the importance of a healthy, stable marriage to lifelong happiness.8 Third is the negative effect of alcohol on marital and lifetime success and happiness. Alcohol abuse touches one-third of families in the United States and is involved in one-fourth of hospital admissions. It plays a major role in death, bad health, and diminished accomplishment.9
A recent Washington Post front-page article based on U.S. federal health data reported that “women in America are drinking far more, and far more frequently, than their mothers or grandmothers did, and alcohol consumption is killing them in record numbers.” The article concluded that “the current and emerging science does not support the purported benefits of moderate drinking” and that “the risk of death from cancer appears to go up with any level of alcohol consumption.”
- MARCH 2018
- WHEN EVIL APPEARS GOOD AND GOOD APPEARS EVIL
When Evil Appears Good and Good Appears Evil
By Elder Quentin L. Cook
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
From a devotional address, “A Banquet of Consequences: The Cumulative Result of All Choices,” given at Brigham Young University on February 7, 2017. For the full address, visit speeches.byu.edu.
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