Smoking: Enhancing Pleasure of Experiences

By Jonathan On Jul 5, 2017

The research is important in showing that the pleasure of smoking goes beyond nicotine’s effects in the brain. It also enhances the pleasure smokers derive from their surroundings.

Scientists Explain Chocolate Cravings
October 12, 2007
SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON — If that craving for chocolate sometimes feels like it is coming from deep in your gut, that’s because maybe it is.
A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.
That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.
Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn’t part of an effort to convert a few to the dark side (or even milk) side of cocoa, Kocchar said.
In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don’t eat chocolate.
Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called “weird” for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.
The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine (an active ingredient in energy drinks) was higher in people who didn’t eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.
The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.
Still to be determined is if the bacteria cause the craving, or if early in life people’s diets changed the bacteria, which then reinforced food choices.
How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.
Past studies have shown that intestinal bacteria change when people lose weight, said Dr. Sam Klein, an obesity expert and professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis.
Since bacteria interact with what you eat, it is logical to think that there is a connection between those microbes and desires for certain foods, said Klein, who wasn’t part of Kochhar’s study.
Kochhar’s research makes so much sense that people should have thought of it earlier, said J. Bruce German, professor of food chemistry at the University of California Davis. While five outside scientists thought the study was intriguing, Dr. Richard Bergman at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, had concerns about the accuracy of the initial division of the men into groups that wanted chocolate or were indifferent to it.
What matters to Kochhar is where the research could lead.
Kochhar said the relationship between food, people and what grows in their gut is important for the future: “If we understand the relationship, then we can find ways to nudge it in the right direction.”

The ‘addictions’ racket

By Dimitri Vassilaros, TRIBUNE-REVIEW
August 31, 2007

Could you really be addicted to substances and behaviors?

John Luik, University of Oxford Rhodes Scholar and senior fellow at the Democracy Institute in Washington, D.C., says the definition of addiction has been manipulated to increase health-care profits by lowering personal responsibility. So, could dark chocolate from Belgium be addictive?

Fat chance, he says.

“When people hear the word ‘addiction,’ they imagine addiction means hopelessly and compulsively using against your will — addicted to illegal drugs and smoking,” says Mr. Luik, author of “Science Through the Looking-Glass: The Manipulation of ‘Addiction’ and Its Influence on Public Policy.”

But now the word also is used by lawyers regarding certain foods, essentially saying people have no control over eating and drinking as well as other types of human behavior, Luik says.

Are humans simply victims of their needs, wants and, especially, their darkest desires?

“My central message is that when you look at the research, it’s simply not true. People do have control over their behavior. They are not forced to do any of these things. When people say they have to eat hamburgers and milkshakes, there’s no scientific evidence to suggest that is true,” he says.

That could have profound implications regarding lawsuits alleging harm by the fast-food industry.

Your Honor, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury; every day Ronald McDonald ordered me to eat a dozen Big Macs and untold supersized fries. I am at his mercy. To be made whole, that clown must be made to pay.

“So the downside of this is that you have a whole group of people who’ve had the burden of responsibility removed. They are no longer responsible for their own behavior,” Luik says.

Addiction labeling accelerated in the 1970s when the culprit — the pubic health establishment — said smokers were addicted and, therefore, it was supposedly harder for them to quit, he says.

The impact was horrible, Luik says, because it lessened the motivation to try changing their behavior. The alternative was to look for redress from the government or the evil industry. Picture Big Tobacco thugs ramming unfiltered cigarettes up people’s noses.

Big Health Care may declare addictions to food and video games, he says. New ailments can mean new money from government and other entities for the health-care industry to deal with the so-called malady, Luik says.

Unlike cancer, heart disease or even an ingrown toenail, addiction cannot be proven, he says. There’s no test, not even a way to prove that the so-called addict has not tried hard enough to stop.

There’s also a nettlesome Catch-22.

“Once you say that any class of people can overcome an addiction, it removes the argument that it’s a compulsive behavior,” Luik says. “Even if you look at smoking, 50 million living Americans have quit.” When that fact is juxtaposed with the claim that smoking is addictive, are there really any “victims”?

Willpower can stop the desire to smoke, drink alcohol or gamble, he says. But can willpower even cure a toenail, let alone cancer?

Rugged individualism and rational thought somehow have morphed into wretched victimhood and repulsive stupidity.

How do “victims” willingly degrade themselves — demanding rewards for not resisting temptation — without dying of shame?

Dimitri Vassilaros is a Trib editorial page columnist. His column appears Sundays, Mondays and Fridays. Call him at 412-380-5637. E-mail him at dvassilaros@tribweb.com.

Studies show nicotine enhances other pleasures

May 04, 2007
By David Templeton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A series of University of Pittsburgh studies could help explain why smokers and tavern owners are adamant in their opposition to a smoking ban.

The research is important in showing that the pleasure of smoking goes beyond nicotine’s effects in the brain. It also enhances the pleasure smokers derive from their surroundings.

“The effect of the drug [nicotine] is that it makes a lot of things in the environment more pleasurable and more attractive, and that’s hard to give up,” said Anthony R. Caggiula, chairman of Pitt’s psychology department.

Dr. Cagguila, Eric Donny, a Pitt assistant professor of psychology, and Alan F. Sved, chairman of Pitt’s neuroscience department, produced a series of journal articles based on 15-year-long rat studies, the latest appearing in the May edition of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Their study provides evidence that nicotine also creates “reinforcing enhancements” of smokers’ surroundings, which also can improve social interaction and enhance the effects of the alcohol they are imbibing.

But Dr. Sved said their studies should not be used to advocate smoking inside or outside bars. Instead, the studies show the importance of developing better smoking cessation drugs that could provide the same reinforcing enhancements that nicotine creates, making it easier to quit smoking.

“I would hate it if our research would do anything to promote smoking and promote people being exposed to smoking,” Dr. Sved said.

Drs. Caggiula and Sved said applying study results to smoking inside bars involves some extrapolation, but it can be done.

Enjoyment of one’s surroundings is enhanced when nicotine is combined with alcohol, Dr. Caggiula said. Both bring pleasure to the same spot in the brain and would heighten enjoyment of one’s surroundings.

“Smoking enhances other drugs, and it works in both directions,” he said. That could explain why some people smoke only inside bars.

During the studies, researchers observed how rats without nicotine in their systems show only fleeting interest in pressing a bar that caused lights to flash. But rats using nicotine repeatedly made the lights flash.

They concluded that nicotine increased the appreciation and pleasure the rats experienced from the lights.

Dr. Caggiula said researchers long have known that nicotine is a primary source of pleasure, much like food and sex. But the studies revealed that nicotine, as with other drugs, enhances other pleasures. If you enjoy something, nicotine will increase the enjoyment.

“People go into a bar and their smoking and drinking is more pleasurable, as is their interaction with others,” he said. “So you want to repeat it.”

Rita Barry, manager of Barry’s Public House, said there are many customers who smoke only when they are in the South Side tavern. “It’s very common, especially in the college crowd,” she said. “I see it very much.”

Brian Blasik, a bartender and customer at Lucky Frank’s Irish Pub in Braddock, said a smoking ban would reduce the number of customers for the very reasons the researchers describe.

Both bars have received waivers on the Allegheny County smoking ban until January 2009.

The Pitt studies show that new smoking-cessation drugs should replace the effect of nicotine, Dr. Caggiula said, by enhancing the pleasure of one’s surroundings.

“People can give up smoking without losing that enhancing effect,” he said. “That might be one way it is effective in keeping people from smoking.”

The act of entering a bar will increase a smoker’s craving for a cigarette, Dr. Caggiula said.

“People might be less enthusiastic about going to the bar because they are not able to do something they did that gave a lot of pleasure,” he said.

Nicotine Also Hooks Smokers by Enhancing Pleasure of Experiences, 15-Year Pitt Research Project Suggests

May 1, 2007
Morgan Kelly

PITTSBURGH-The smoker puffing away in the corner might be hooked on more than just nicotine. A 15-year study by University of Pittsburgh researchers suggests that nicotine also enhances the pleasure smokers get from their surroundings when they smoke and creates a psychological link between that amplified satisfaction and cigarettes.

The findings present new ideas about the way nicotine works and the reason people become addicted to cigarettes, said principal investigators Anthony R. Caggiula, professor and chair of the psychology department; Eric Donny, assistant professor of psychology; and Alan F. Sved, professor and chair of the neuroscience department, all in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences. The ongoing research has yielded more than a dozen academic journal articles. One of the latest appears in the May edition of the journal “Neuropsychopharmacology.”

Current ideas about cigarette addiction and cessation focus largely on a smoker’s appetite for nicotine, Caggiula said. Psychologically, nicotine joins other such addictive drugs as heroin and cocaine-and even basic needs like food and water-in the category of primary reinforcers. These reinforcers drive people to engage in and repeat behaviors that result in achieving the desired substance.

Without discounting nicotine as a powerful primary reinforcer, Donny said, the Pitt research proposes that nicotine also amplifies the satisfaction smokers get from their environment, from the smell of cigarette smoke to drinking in a favorite bar. This second action of nicotine is known as a reinforcement enhancing effect. Smokers associate the heightened enjoyment with cigarettes and continue smoking to recapture that sensation.

Nicotine’s pleasure-intensifying properties help explain why smoking remains among the hardest habits to overcome despite the well-publicized perils of cigarettes and ample cessation therapies that administer nicotine, Caggiula said.

“If people were just after nicotine,” Caggiula asked, “why don’t they get addicted to it in other ways such as drinking it or shooting it into their arm? But people don’t do those things-they smoke cigarettes. There has to be something else at work here other than just an easy way to get nicotine. We’re not saying that focusing on the physical addiction to nicotine is worthless, but it’s incomplete.”

Caggiula, Donny, Sved, and other researchers debuted their current ideas on nicotine addiction in the journal “Psychopharmacology “in 2003. The article stemmed from an experiment wherein rats with constant exposure to nicotine repeatedly pressed a bar that caused a set of lights to blink. The amount of nicotine the rats received did not rely on how often they pressed the bar, yet their interest in pressing the bar and seeing the subsequent lights remained high after ingesting nicotine. Conversely, Sved added, the rats showed only a fleeting interest in the lights when they did not have nicotine in their systems. The researchers concluded that nicotine increased the rats’ interest in the lights.

Based on those results, Donny tested the basic conclusion of nicotine as a reinforcement enhancer in clinical trials on people. He gave 30 adult smokers cigarettes with nearly all the nicotine removed. The study’s participants smoked the cigarettes for a week or more before their interest in the cigarettes subsided, he said. Considering the absence of nicotine, Donny concluded that the smokers in the study derived pleasure from the act of smoking itself. The results were published in the February edition of the journal “Addiction.” Similar research is under way.