Certain Foods Help Lessen Nicotine Cravings

If you are trying to quit smoking and found some days are much harder than others it could be the food you eat. Some foods may dampen your cravings for the addictive nicotine that keeps you hooked.

Try Oats -
Yes eating oats, as in oatmeal and oat bran, may help you stifle nicotine cravings and kick the cigarette habit. Boiled oats have long been used in India's Ayurvedic system of medicine to treat opium addiction. Then someone noticed that the recovered addicts often lost interest in cigarettes as well. That led researcher C.L. Anand at Ruchill Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, to do a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment published in the scientific journal, Nature.

He took committed cigarette smokers and gave one group an extract of fresh oats and others a placebo. A month later the oat eaters had diminished cravings for cigarettes and were smoking only one-third as they had before the test or as the non-oat eating controls. In fact, five of the thirteen oat eaters stopped smoking entirely; seven cut back by 50 percent. Only one continued to smoke as before. Further, the craving was suppressed for as long as two months after the smokers stopped eating the oats! A later study in mice identified a compound in the oats thought to be the active anti-smoking ingredient.

If you going to wean off cigarettes there it may help by eating certain foods that increase body alkalinity. The reason this helps; High-alkaline foods tend to "recirculate" nicotine in the body, maintaining high levels of the addictive stuff; so such foods tend to lessen he need for nicotine intake, says David Daughton, Ph.D., a nicotine researcher at the U of Nebraska Medical Center. Other foods that make the urine more acid tend to flush away nicotine, increasing cravings for cigarettes. If you quit cold turkey it probably won't make any difference in what you eat.

Foods that may make weaning off cigarettes easier by increasing body alkalinity:
Spinach
Beet Greens
Raisins
Figs
Dried Lima Beans
Dandelion Greens
Almonds

Foods that may make it harder by increasing body acidity:
Alcohol
Red Meat
Liver
Organ Meat
Wheat Germ
Dried Lentils
Chicken
Eggs
Cheese
Peanuts
English Walnuts
Plums
Prunes
Cranberries
Coffee

Resources;
Jean Carper; Food Your Miracle Medicine, 1993; 448-449

This Article Featured on Reuters.com

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