Relationship Between Cigarette Smoking and Other Unhealthy Behaviors Among Our Nation's Youth: United States, 1992

Advance Data 263.  This report presents data on the relationship between cigarette smoking and a number of other high risk behaviors among adolescents in the United States. The National Health Interview Survey-Youth Risk Behavior Survey was developed to provide estimates of health risk behaviors for the noninstitutionalized household population of youth aged 12-21 years.

Data Highlights:

About 29 percent of male youth and 26 percent of female youth were current smokers in 1992, about 3 percent of both sexes were former smokers. About 28 percent of male youth and about 30 percent of female youth had experimented with cigarettes but never smoked regularly. About 40 percent of youth had never taken a puff of a cigarette.

Among both males and females, current marijuana use was considerably more prevalent among current smokers than among youth who were not currently smoking. Male adolescents who were current smokers (28.1 percent) and former smokers (27.5 percent) were almost seven times more likely to have used smokeless tobacco in the past month than were male youth who had never smoked (4.1 percent).

Male youth current smokers were more likely to have engaged in physical fighting (64.1 percent) than males who had experimented with cigarettes (47.1 percent) and those who had never smoked (38.4 percent). Among female adolescents, current smokers (44.3 percent) were more than twice as likely as never smokers (19.8 percent) to have engaged in physical fighting in the past year.

Overall, 87.0 percent of all adolescents consumed less than the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. The consumption of fruits and vegetables was somewhat more common among adolescents who currently smoked (89.6 percent) than among those who had never smoked (83.6 percent).

This page last reviewed January 11, 2007