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 says. "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. [b]These foods tended to be fruits and vegetables, noncaffeinated beverages such as water and juice, dairy beverages, and dairy foods.[/b]
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So give these foods a try and avoid any possible food triggers until you get far enough along in your quit that it no longer matters.
Learn all you can and [i]Outsmart your addiction.[/i]
[color=blue][font=Tahoma]All the best~[/color]
[img]http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/6922/n3us.gif[/img][size=3][color=blue]2[/color][/size][img]http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/2344/k6ob.gif[/img][/color]
[color=maroon][size=2][font=impact]I Killed the Nicodemon and got off scot-free and you can too!
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[B]My Milage:[/B]
[B]My Quit Date: [/B] 8/20/2005
[B]Smoke-Free Da