Smoking

There has long been a popular tradition that smoking inhibits eating, and as a result, people who smoke are less likely to put on weight. Consequently, the giving up of smoking is often associated with the person gaining weight. Indeed, in 1964, a report given to the U.S. Surgeon General raised the possibility of cigarette smoking having certain laxative effects on the body which served to counter obesity, and according to some people, therefore counterbalanced the health hazard posed by smoking cigarettes. Some [Page 696]studies have also shown that obese individuals are less likely to smoke than nonobese people.

During the late 19th century, it was observed, anecdotally in Britain and the United States, that heavy smokers were often gaunt, and it was not until the 1964 report by the advisory committee to the U.S. Surgeon General Luther Leonidas Terry that it was publicly acknowledged that although smoking caused death from cancer, it did seem to promote “good intestinal tone and bowel habits,” having a medically proven laxative effect which countered obesity to some degree. Furthermore, the smoking of cigarettes was seen to stimulate smokers when they became fatigued, whereas nonsmokers might get more energy from eating food. The report, however, did clearly stipulate that the positive effects of smoking in no way counterbalanced the “significant health hazard” posed by smoking cigarettes.

With campaigns during the 1970s to encourage people to stop smoking, it was soon discovered that it was more difficult to get women in the United States to give up the habit than men. Part of this was believed to have been that women fulfilled so many more different roles than men, and the smoking was used to calm them down, with many believing that by giving up smoking cigarettes, they would put on more weight quickly. Certainly, reports during the 1970s tended to show that in the initial stages after giving up smoking, many people did notice an increased edginess as well as an increase in their body weight. Indeed, this was confirmed by a study by Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which showed that during the late 1970s, nonsmokers weighed on average seven pounds more than smokers. It was argued that this might have been because smoking increased the metabolic rate of people.

Others suggested that the extra energy needed for breathing for smokers, every day, was also contributing to their weight loss. Some people in the cigarette industry leaped at the concept and started to promote their products as being associated with slimness, especially for teenagers, and even more particularly with females who tended to find it more difficult to give up smoking than men. The tobacco manufacturers cultivated the image of the woman who smokes as someone who might be using their product—cigarettes—as a beauty aid, and symbolize their liberation from male oppression.

Smoking stimulates smokers when they became fatigued, whereas nonsmokers might get more energy from eating food.

In recent years, there have been studies that have dealt with the problem in the opposite manner to the research in the 1970s, which had been concerned with why smokers were, on average, less likely to be obese than nonsmokers. Some studies conducted in the 1990s proved that obese individuals are less likely to smoke.

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