Vegetables, Milk May Help People Quit Smoking
Getting ready to quit smoking? Try eating more vegetables
and less meat -- and swap that coffee for a glass of milk.
A Duke University study shows that fruits, vegetables, and dairy foods make
cigarettes taste terrible. But meat, coffee, and alcoholic beverages make
smoking much tastier, find Duke University psychologist F. Joseph McClernon,
PhD, and colleagues.
"The conventional wisdom is that cigarette addiction is all about the
nicotine," McClernon tells WebMD. "But we are learning more and more it
is also about sensory effects like the taste and the smell and the visual
experience and the habitual routines of smoking. The taste effects are
important."
McClernon, a researcher at the Duke center for nicotine and smoking
research, kept hearing smokers say that certain foods and beverages made their
cigarettes taste much better. He began to wonder exactly which foods these were
-- and whether any foods made smoking a worse experience.
To study the issue, he asked 209 smokers to list foods that worsened or
enhanced the smoking experience. The smokers averaged a little better than a
pack of cigarettes a day for an average 21 years. About half were women, a
fourth were black, two-thirds were white, and nearly all of them were
high-school or college graduates.
Nearly 70% of the smokers said some foods made their cigarettes taste
better. These foods tended to be caffeinated beverages, alcoholic beverages,
and meat.
Surprisingly, just under half of the smokers -- 45% -- said some foods made
their cigarettes taste worse. These foods tended to be fruits and vegetables,
noncaffeinated beverages such as water and juice, dairy beverages, and dairy
foods.
"We were surprised that smokers would say anything would make their
cigarettes taste worse," McClernon says.
Black Smokers at Greater Risk
Another surprise: Menthol-cigarette smokers were very likely to say that
their cigarettes tasted the same no matter what kind of foods and beverages
they consumed. Nearly 90% of the black study participants smoked menthol
cigarettes.
This means that black smokers may have a particularly hard time quitting
cigarettes, suggests Scott McIntosh, PhD, associate professor of medicine at
the University of Rochester in New York and director of the greater Rochester
area tobacco cessation center.
McIntosh says most experts think the reason why black Americans are more
likely to smoke menthol cigarettes is because they were targeted to do so by
tobacco-company ads, McIntosh tells WebMD. "But this study suggests that
menthol lessens the effect of taste deadening or enhancing. And you are more
likely to be addicted if you are not affected by variations in taste and
pleasure."
McClernon and McIntosh note that counselors tell people who quit smoking to
drink lots of water and to eat carrots and celery sticks.
"The idea is to get the smoker to do something with the hands and mouth
that is not smoking -- but it might actually be good to engage in some of these
behaviors before quitting, to alter the taste," McClernon says.
"We might ask clinicians to ask patients getting ready to quit to start
consuming healthy dairy products also to see if they can alter their smoking
behavior that way."
McIntosh says this is an exciting idea that will add to the repertoire of
quit-smoking counselors. He looks forward to suggesting the technique to the
counselors he trains.
"And this emboldens me for a strategy we use called habit breaking,"
he says. "The idea is to switch to a different brand of cigarettes -- and
smokers say brand has a dramatic effect on taste. So if taste is such a
predictor of enjoyment, this is a good reason to tell people to switch brands
as a quitting strategy. It might be even more powerful than we are
thinking."
McClernon says he doesn't know why some foods make cigarettes taste worse
but he plans to find out.
"We are going o do research to try to understand why drinking water and
eating fruits and vegetables worsens the taste of cigarettes," he says.
"We don't have a lot of super good ideas about that right now. But if we
understood the mechanisms, we could maybe use them to develop new
treatments."
Smokers, particularly teen smokers, tend to have a poorer diet than
nonsmokers do. So while quitting smoking may be the best thing you can do for
your health, it isn't the only thing, suggests Avery M. Lutz, a Duke research
technician who worked on the McClernon study.
"It can't hurt to eat more fruits and vegetables even before people quit
smoking. It will help them have a healthier life," she tells WebMD.
The McClernon study appears in the April issue of the journal Nicotine
& Tobacco Research.
By Daniel DeNoon
Reviewed by Louise Chang
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