[subungual]

I fully understand what you're saying, but it's somewhat skew to the point I'm trying to make. The people I'm talking about are the ones who have already baked health effects of their habits into their calculus and claim to acknowledge them. For someone who has already bought into the idea that their smoking or drinking will shorten their lives, an elevated BP reading, finding themselves having trouble taking more than one flight of stairs, or even having some chest or leg pain when they're walking around are unlikely to be major wake-up calls. My point is that people may know the end result, but they generally don't have a sense of what the path to that result looks like and underestimate its effects.