Twice A Day Nicotine Dosing Can Help Weight Loss

Nicotine is known to increase metabolism, which enables the body to burn food more quickly.  A new study seems to confirm this by showing that taking nicotine every day can help reduce weight.

Weight gain can be a worry for smokers especially when they are trying to quit. Many of them report gaining weight when they do quit, with most gaining between 4 and 10 pounds in the months after quitting.  This can often lead to aborted attempts at quitting or relapse to smoking.

Researchers have therefore been studying how nicotine impacts body weight in an effort to create new nicotine-based treatments that would allow smokers to quit without the worry of gaining weight.

This latest study, which was conducted in mice, confirms that exposure to nicotine can help weight loss, but also shows that the nicotine had a greater effect if it was given twice a day.

In addition to helping lose weight, dosing with nicotine also increased a type of fat that helps to burn calories, which may explain why nicotine increases metabolic rate – an increased metabolic rate means that more calories are used up with less effort.  Nicotine has also been shown to reduce appetite.

While the amount of nicotine used was important, the frequency of dosage was also important, according to the researchers. The best results were achieved by dosing the mice twice a day.

The study was published in the Journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research.