Nicotine Benefits (That We Don’t Recommend)!

It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!

Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!

In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!

As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!

So, no question/request too big or small

❝Does nicotine have any benefits at all? I know it’s incredibly addictive but if you exclude the addiction, does it do anything?❞

Good news: yes, nicotine is a stimulant and can be considered a performance enhancer, for example:

❝Compared with the placebo group, the nicotine group exhibited enhanced motor reaction times, grooved pegboard test (GPT) results on cognitive function, and baseball-hitting performance, and small effect sizes were noted (d = 0.47, 0.46 and 0.41, respectively).❞

~ Chi-Cheng Lu et al.

Read in full: Acute Effects of Nicotine on Physiological Responses and Sport Performance in Healthy Baseball Players

However, another study found that its use as a cognitive enhancer was only of benefit when there was already a cognitive impairment:

❝Studies of the effects of nicotinic systems and/or nicotinic receptor stimulation in pathological disease states such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia show the potential for therapeutic utility of nicotinic drugs.

In contrast to studies in pathological states, studies of nicotine in normal-non-smokers tend to show deleterious effects.

This contradiction can be resolved by consideration of cognitive and biological baseline dependency differences between study populations in terms of the relationship of optimal cognitive performance to nicotinic receptor activity.

Although normal individuals are unlikely to show cognitive benefits after nicotinic stimulation except under extreme task conditions, individuals with a variety of disease states can benefit from nicotinic drugs❞

~ Dr. Alexandra Potter et al.

Read in full: Effects of nicotinic stimulation on cognitive performance

Bad news: its addictive qualities wipe out those benefits due to tolerance and thus normalization in short order. So you may get those benefits briefly, but then you’re addicted and also lose the benefits, as well as also ruining your health—making it a lose/lose/lose situation quite quickly.

See also: A sensitization-homeostasis model of nicotine craving, withdrawal, and tolerance: integrating the clinical and basic science literature

As an aside, while nicotine is poisonous per se, in the quantities taken by most users, the nicotine itself is not usually what kills. It’s mostly the other stuff that comes with it (smoking is by far and away the worst of all; vaping is relatively less bad, but that’s not a strong statement in this case) that causes problems.

See also: Vaping: A Lot Of Hot Air?

However, this is still not an argument for, say, getting nicotine gum and thinking “no harmful effects” because then you’ll be get a brief performance boost yes before it runs out and being addicted to it and now being in a position whereby if you stop, your performance will be lower than before you started (since you now got used to it, and it became your new normal), before eventually recovering:

The effects of nicotine withdrawal on exercise-related physical ability and sports performance in nicotine addicts: a systematic review and meta-analysis

In summary

We recommend against using nicotine in the first place, and for those who are addicted, we recommend quitting immediately if not contraindicated (check with your doctor if unsure; there are some situations where it is inadvisable to take away something your body is dependent on, until you correct some other thing first).

For more on quitting in general, see:

Addiction Myths That Are Hard To Quit

Take care!