Study says smoking enhances athletic performance

It has been a wild couple of weeks, so in the interest of giving us all a bit of a break from mainstream news, I thought I would share a rather unusual medical story that recently appeared on social media: Cigarette smoking, apparently, is “an underused tool in high-performance endurance training,” such as training for marathons, triathlons, mountain climbing and other intensive sports.

The study, which was published in the respected Canadian Medical Association Journal, is actually not new; it first appeared in December 2010, but received widespread attention only recently. If you would like to read the full study yourself, you can find it online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001541/)