Among the inventories compiled by public health experts of things we can do to advance our health and extend our lives, to stop smoking is generally high on the hit parade. Its listing is no shocker, no wake-up call. We've known for more than 50 years that smoking is a habit that can kill you.

So when the capital of China, Beijing, last week launched a host of anti-smoking measures to stem the toll this habit is having on the country's health, it may have simply been viewed as yet another reminder of the things we do to endanger our health and the need for change.

Yet it is worthy of a further look and deeper consideration. China is the world's largest consumer of tobacco, and Beijing is one of the world's most populous cities, with 21.5 million people. According to the Chinese Association on Tobacco Control, there are more than 300 million smokers throughout China — nearly the entire population of the United States. Another 740 million men, women and children are affected by secondhand smoke produced by these smokers. What is the result of all these numbers? The saddest tally of them all: More than 1.3 million people die of smoking-related diseases every year in China. That's a number higher than the death toll caused by AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined in that country.

What should also not be lost in this news is the fact that these measures are being put in place when China's state-owned China National Tobacco Corp. stands as the largest tobacco company in the world, with sales that make up 7 to 10 percent of government revenue.

What this action underscores is the troubling fact that smoking not only is a serious health crisis in China but also remains a major global health concern. Tobacco consumption more than doubled in the developing world from 1970 to 2000, according to the United Nations. Much of this increase was in China. That number is now in decline, thanks to public health efforts. Not so in many other developing countries. Today more than three-quarters of the world's smokers live in the developing world. In Pakistan, 100,000 people a year die from tobacco use.

And in case anyone out there needs another reason to quit smoking, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in February found that smoking may be responsible for more deaths than it is officially given credit for. This conclusion was based on health data from nearly 1 million people followed over a 10-year period. When researchers analyzed the causes of deaths of smokers — eliminating diseases currently associated with the habit — they found smoking was linked to significantly increased risks of infection, kidney disease, intestinal disease caused by inadequate blood flow, and heart and lung ailments not previously attributed to tobacco. In effect, 17 percent of deaths were caused by previously non-associated maladies, confirming smoking's harm to nearly every system in the body.

A sign of hope in all of this is that it has long been established that once people stop smoking, their risks drops dramatically; there are immediate health benefits. These benefits increase the longer you go without smoking. Several months after quitting, substantial improvements in lung function can be expected. Within a few years, people have experienced lower risks of cancer, heart disease and other chronic diseases than they would have had if they had continued to smoke. Quitting at any age has been shown to significantly prolong life.

Now for the bad news: In this country alone, where smoking has dropped from 42 percent of the population in 1965 to approximately 19 percent today, it means that millions still smoke, augmented by a steady stream of others picking up the habit every year. Smoking is still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States.

Part of the reason smoking remains such a difficult health problem to solve has to do with why the World Health Organization calls tobacco a "gradual killer." Though smoking harms your health, the smoker doesn't notice it at first. By the time the smoker starts feeling the health consequences, he or she is addicted.

Even with ever-tightening restrictions on advertising, in 2011 alone big tobacco spent $8.37 billion on ads and promotional expenses in the United States to peddle its products. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that breaks down to about $27 a year to reach every single American. It is a form of persuasion that continues to work, especially with young people.

"Most young smokers believe that they can easily quit at any time, and nearly all believe that they won't be long-term smokers," notes Sherry McKee, the director of the Yale Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory.

"Ultimately, they will lose their capacity to make a free choice to smoke," adds Jed Rose, the director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation. "(Thirty) years later, that's when we typically see them in our program desperately trying to quit, because now they can't go a single day without (a cigarette)."

A new study published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology not unsurprisingly suggests that some hopeful quitters are just more mentally equipped to handle the challenge than others. Researchers looked at the brain activity of a group of 85 heavy smokers. They found that people who had stronger connections between two regions of the brain — one involved in reward, the other in controlling impulsive behavior — were likelier to be successful at giving up smoking. The hope is to take this knowledge and come up with a means to help those who are struggling with quitting.

"It's a frontier area, and one that we are interested in going after in terms of interventions for smoking cessation," says study leader Joseph McClernon, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University.

If an effective treatment were to be uncovered, it would be a game changer in eliminating the current No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States. That is, unless big tobacco could come up with a plan to muck that up, as well.

Write to Chuck Norris ([email protected]) with your questions about health and fitness. Follow Chuck Norris through his official social media sites, on Twitter @chucknorris and Facebook's "Official Chuck Norris Page." He blogs at http://chucknorrisnews.blogspot.com. To find out more about Chuck Norris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.