Benefits of nicotine

Benefits of Nicotine This is from a friend who met a lady from Ventura who produces a health newsletter...she met her at the Long Beach Health Expo recently: Benefits of Nicotine Yes, you read that right. And although you'll never find me lighting up - that disgusto smell and yellow teeth, no thank you! - I do now have more understanding about exactly why it's so hard to stop. Turns out nicotine has powerful healing properties. It all started about 8-9 years ago when I was researching gluten intolerance and found a very obscure study in which nicotine demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties on the gut. What does long term systemic inflammation lead to? Autoimmune compromisation. And isn't cancer an auto-immune disorder? The light bulb appeared and proceeded to smash itself on my head as I remembered the final year of my mother's life. A smoker since age 12 and then in her 70's, she had had a lung collapse. Her extended stay in the hospital had forced her to do what her kids had been begging and bullying her to do for years - end her 60+ year cigarette addiction. What a good thing! all us children said to one another, nodding our heads. Except that almost as soon as my mother arrived home from rehab her lifelong bowel issues (due to what I now believe was undiagnosed gluten intolerance) exploded into an emergency - bleeding from the rectum. No one, including her doctor, ever thought the two changes - quitting smoking and a bleeding gut - were related. Know what my mother died of shortly thereafter? A particularly virulent form of lung cancer. Now, unquestionably all those years of inhaling chemical-laden cigarette smoke did damage to my mother's lungs. What's debatable in my mind, though, is which did more damage - the chemicals the cigarette companies added to her tobacco or the smoke itself? The other question that niggles at the back of my mind is whether or not my mother would have had a few more years of life had she been able to continue to experience the effects of her anti-inflammatory nicotine. Let me ask you smokers something - ever get the desire to light up just after a meal? That is indicative of having just eaten a meal to which you're having an allergic reaction (was it gluten-or-pasteurized-dairy-laden, by any chance, oh say, pasta or pizza?). You crave the nicotine to help deal with the inflammatory responses your body is having to the food. How I Would Quit Smoking... Step One: Whenever someone comes to me for help with quitting smoking, I always tell them the first step is to: •Continue smoking, but switch to organic tobacco. This eliminates all those chemicals (up to 600!) added by the manufacturer to commercial cigarettes. You'll have to learn how to roll your own, but don't skip this first step - it's critical! We have to reduce your body's overall toxic load in order to reduce your cravings. Step Two: •Focus on changing the diet to eliminate any foods you may be having allergic responses to, the top two suspects being pasteurized dairy and gluten. (There are, of course, many more potential allergens, but that is a much longer discussion. Contact me for a consult for more information.) Reduce the amount of allergic responses you're having to food and you'll reduce the need to use nicotine to help heal the damage done by those allergic reactions. The stronger your body, the easier it will be to quit because your cravings will be less. Step Three: •Eat Real Foods with an emphasis on lots of calming saturated fats along with moderate amounts of animal protein to support the adrenal glands and reduce overall inflammatory responses. Add probiotics and lacto-fermented foods to soothe the gut. Step Four: •Once your health is stabilized, then start the process of cutting down on the number of cigarettes you smo