Smoking is not linked to weight loss, finds study

In a study published in the journal Addiction, researchers reported that people who started smoking as well as a lifetime of smoking may increase visceral fat, an unhealthy fat that is associated with an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and dementia.

Smoking cigarettes is the leading cause of preventable diseases and death and kills more than 4,80,000 people every year. People who smoke often have a lower body weight than people who don’t smoke, but they also have more abdominal and visceral fat, especially the kind found deep within the abdominal cavity.

As part of their study, the researchersused a type of statistical analysis to determine whether smoking increased abdominal fat.They used results from different genetic studies to find if there was a causal relationship between smoking and an increase in abdominal fat, also referred to as abdominal adiposity.They also examined previous genetic studies in order to identify genes that are linked to the habit of smoking as well as body fat distribution and further used that genetic information to establish whether people who had genes that were associated with a smoking habit typically had a difference in the distribution of their body fat.

“Our study showed that smoking initiation and lifetime smoking may causally increase abdominal adiposity, as indicated by higher waist to hip ratio… While we found no evidence of an association between smoking heaviness and abdominal fat distribution, our reverse causal analysis indicated that higher abdominal adiposity may causally increase smoking heaviness,” said the study authors.

“It’s not true that smoking makes you thin. And in fact, the image of thinness with smoking is one that’s been heavily promoted by the industry in some of their advertising,”said Dr. Jonathan Klein, a physician at Stanford University in California and a researcher in tobacco control.“It isn’t that smoking makes you thin, it’s that when smokers try to quit, they sometimes gain weight. When people stop their addiction, they often find that they have more food cravings and it also is an oral activity and so people who are used to having their mouth busy often replace the cigarette or others tobacco behaviour with food behaviour.”

Reference: Journal: Addiction