Nicotine is a stimulant that suppresses appetite, so maybe former smokers are more likely to gain weight?

Both obesity and cigarettes are more common among the poor. Maybe there’s a connection there?

30 comments

  1. I think the connection is that the obesity epidemic really kicked off at the same time US culture became extremely anti-tobacco.

  2. I think people with less income don’t have the access to healthier foods that other people do and smoking is a tough habit to break and a vice that some people may use to cope with whatever they are going through in their life

  3. Sounds like smoking is an appetite supressent. We’ll need a supplement. Maybe Ozempic or the other one.

  5. Tobacco companies shifted their focus to manufacturing and marketing foods that has similarly addictive qualities.

  6. Less smoking(that’s fine, though), inactivity is at an all time high as we drive everywhere, food is no longer a scarcity, especially processed foods which just make you hungrier, but the sugar industry’s demonization of fat in the 80s and 90s was the parade marshall.

  7. I’m sure that smoking cessation had some effect, but on a large scale it’s more likely to be a parallel trend. The rise in obesity also mirrors the fat-free diet trends that started in the 1980s, when all of a sudden loads of foods were engineered to have the fat removed from them, mostly by replacement with sugars and starches to improve the mouthfeel. As dietary fat is essential for good health and satiation, that massive dietary shift was much more likely to have had an effect on metabolic health.

    Researchers are also still figuring out what effects environmental pollutants and the massive increase in the production and use of plastics have had on metabolism and other physiological processes.

  8. As someone who quit smoking, my appetite went through the roof and I craved sweet stuff too. That was over a decade ago now but yeah I definitely saw weight gain when quitting. That’s my personal experience though.

  11. In my language class in Europe, made up of people from all over Europe, they were laughing when we were at a coffee shop and asking ne why Americans are fat and they were all smoking (even our teacher smokes), and I said we don’t smoke, and they got mad.

    Even the vegetarian guy had pizza for lunch, so it’s not like they eat healthy.

  12. My tiny granny smoked from 12yo to 67, she quit smoking, gained 100 lbs, and then died. On the other hand, my slightly larger mother also started smoking at 12, began exercising, lost 100lbs, kept smoking and died at 66yo.

    Obligatory, I’m not a doctor.

  13. I reject the premise. Obesity and increasing rates of obesity were a problem long before smoking rates started declining.

    We have two bad health behaviors, one is getting worse, the other is getting better. Correlation is not causation!

  14. I think it’s got a lot to do with enormous portions.

    I lived in France for a while in the 90s. No shopping carts, just baskets. If I bought ham it was a package with like 6 slices total. Small refrigerators, maybe not even a freezer. No one ate on the street.

    When I came home American food just seemed so sloppy with enormous portions. And this was even before big box stores started up selling food in packages meant to serve entire parties, not families.

    I have lost a ton of weight over the last many years just by not doing restaurants or takeout or in store shopping anymore.

  15. where i am – arizona downtown phoenix is in a food desert so they opt for cheaper and shittier food causing health problems like obesity.

    i don’t want to say there’s no connection to smoking and obesity but there’s too many variables to say accurately

  16. It’s possible. I think the primary reason for obesity is the abundance of inflammatory seed oils and added sugar in the diet, as well as the built landscape. There are large portions of the US that have no pedestrian infrastructure. You literally have to drive everywhere. Even the healthiest person will break down after spending time in such an environment.

  18. Cigarette companies acquired major food companies (Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods). A lot of research has gone into making food more addictive to boost sales. They used their research to make tobacco more addictive to making food more addictive.

  20. The answer is an overwhelming yes. Both of these have undeniable roots in psychological addiction, corruption with the initial underlying sciences, free and lightly-regulated reign (at least initially for cigarettes) for advertisement, and so on.

    What one must understand is that with the US’s free market capitalistic economy, there is significant incentive and allowance towards creating addictive behaviors. These behaviors keep people returning and giving the corporations money. Even smoking is back on the rise; so many original cigarette companies are now pivoting to vaping targeting especially the younger ones and spreading propaganda like it is clean unlike smoking, doesn’t cause cancer, etc.

    Foods, you can see just as much disinformation over time, wheats (carbs) used to be the most important food group (breakfast food companies loved this). Fat makes you fat (brought to you by the sugar companies). Cigarettes, by comparison, were advertised as “relief for asthma, hay fever, cough, …”

    All of these striking similarities, but you will still see several comments claiming “no” because the similarities and problems are deeply rooted in our system that we call normal.

  21. These things aren’t inverse. This is like thinking the lack of people driving horse and buggy are contributing to global warming

  22. Correlation isn’t causation. Look at Norway, for example, thinner than most U.S. states (I live in Colorado, so this doesn’t necessarily as our obesity rate is 9% and Norway’s is 23%) but has similar smoking statistics (7% of Norwegians smoke, 11% of Americans smoke).

    Source wiki and initial google search.

  23. Obesity was rising before public disapproval of smoking began. Both industries just use chemistry and addiction to keep their pockets fat. Cigarette companies add more addictive chemicals to ensure people keep coming back, just as the food industry uses excessive amounts of salt and sugar (HFCS) in everything for the same reason.

    People just caught on to the adverse effects of smoking while food companies were still muddying the waters with their biased “scientific “ studies. Everyone knows smoking is dangerous, full stop. Ask people about diet and you’ll get several different ideas about what a healthy diet even means. Correlation and causation are different things.

  25. Personal anecdote, but when my wife smoked, she preferred to walk everywhere over taking the bus so she could roll one and enjoy it as she walked. After she quit, she started taking the bus a lot more, but that also has to do with having children.

  27. Not really. More just two parallel movements. One against fat and one against smoking. We just later realized carbs were more the enemy

  30. Not necessarily. I think that anti smoking came out same time as the meat is bad for you stuff.

    I also think cost of living where both parents work full time adds to it as well.

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