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Could nicotine actually be good for you? Ask most people, and they'll tell you it's the thing that gives smokers cancer. Ask some others, and they'll tell you they use it on purpose. Joe Rogan does it. He calls it a neuroprotectant
This video explores the misunderstood effects of nicotine, debunking myths and highlighting its potential benefits and risks.
Key Takeaways
- Nicotine itself does not cause cancer or COPD; the harm comes from other cigarette chemicals.
- Small, controlled doses of nicotine may improve focus and cognitive function.
- Nicotine is addictive, but the risk varies by delivery method and frequency of use.
- Public and medical understanding of nicotine is inconsistent and often incorrect.
- Harm reduction strategies involving nicotine products can save lives by reducing smoking-related deaths.
What the video covers
- Nicotine is widely misunderstood and demonized, often incorrectly blamed for causing cancer and COPD.
- A survey found 80% of American doctors mistakenly believe nicotine directly causes cancer.
- Prominent health influencers and scientists use nicotine in small doses for cognitive enhancement and focus.
- Nicotine raises dopamine and norepinephrine, improving alertness similarly to a strong cup of coffee.
- Nicotine is highly addictive, but the addiction potential of newer forms like pouches and gum is not yet fully understood.
- The real harm from smoking comes from other chemicals in cigarettes, not nicotine itself.
- Nicotine products like gum and pouches are becoming a significant business, with new products like nicotine energy drinks emerging.
- There are concerns about side effects such as gum recession from prolonged nicotine gum use.
- Nicotine is being reconsidered as a potential medicine, especially for neurological conditions and cognitive decline.
- Switching from smoking to less harmful nicotine delivery methods is recommended for smokers already addicted.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Nicotine's Controversial Reputation
- 01:07Video Roadmap and Nicotine's Demonization
- 02:16Health Influencers Using Nicotine for Focus
- 03:32Data Privacy Sponsor Message
- 04:46Nicotine's Effects on Alertness and Metabolism
- 06:10Addiction Risks and Unknowns of New Nicotine Products
- 07:10Misconceptions About Nicotine and Cancer
- 08:26Addiction Definitions and Medical Warnings
- 10:51Nicotine as Harm Reduction and Medical Use
- 13:58Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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that slows down the decline of his nervous system. RFK Jr. is a regular user of nicotine pouches. And a growing number of prominent health influencers say they are too. Here's a number that got me. In a survey of a thousand
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American doctors, cardiologists, oncologists, smart people, four out of five of them said nicotine directly contributes to cancer. But it doesn't.
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Many of the people giving you medical advice don't seem to know the truth. So the elephant in the room is this.
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Something we spent decades treating as pure poison might actually have real legitimate upsides. And saying that out loud almost feels taboo. I'm Ken Leort, and my job here is simple. Did past what everyone assumes and tell you what I
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learned even when it's inconvenient. So, here's where we're headed. I'll start with looking at the unlikely comeback of nicotine. Then, we'll describe how it became the wrong culprit people blamed.
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Then, I'll look at how often it's the exit ramp for smokers before looking at nicotine as medicine. And finally, I'll tackle the unsettled questions. All right, nicotine might just be the most demonized drug in modern history. It's blamed for a body count higher than just
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about any substance on Earth. Doctors, parents, and public health campaigns have spent 60 years warning us away from it. So why is it making an unlikely comeback? As is so often the case, most of this started online with podcasts and
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biohacking forums. But it's quickly moved into the real world. A lot of smart people concerned about their health are choosing to take it. So why?
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Stanford neurobiologist and podcaster Andrew Huberman has said that nicotine sharpens the mind and that he occasionally uses small amounts.
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So occasionally like right now each I do a half a piece but I'm not Russian so I'm a little you know you did you just pop the whole thing in your mouth?
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Mhm. So I'll do a couple milligrams every now and again, and it definitely sharpens the mind. He's told a story in his own show about a colleague of his, a Nobel Prize winner who chose nicotine gum specifically to boost cognitive focus.
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Peter Aia, a physician who's built his entire brand around living longer and better for years has talked about using nicotine gum and lozenges as a focus aid before deep work. Dave Asprey, the guy who basically invented the word
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biohacking, says he doses 1 to 2 milligrams a few times a week specifically for long work sessions and jet lag. I mean, these aren't burnout smoking outside of a 7-Eleven. There are people who read science for a living,
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and they've decided that it's worth doing, of course, carefully and in doses. These days, nicotine is now a big business. Gum sales are worth almost $2 billion a year. Now, there's also a new nicotine energy drink on the market
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infused with nicotine and caffeine. Its first production run, about 250,000 cases, nearly sold out. The company's co-founder said it's stuck in a regulatory limbo, waiting on the government to tell them whether they can actually keep selling it. All this
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hasn't gone unnoticed by big corporations. In 2022, Philip Morris paid 16 billion for the company that makes Zen. It shipped almost 800 million cans in the US alone last year. I'll tell you what they say they get from
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those little white pouches. But first, a few words from today's sponsor, Incogn. They're about protecting you by protecting your data, your watch history, your habits, your engagement.
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It's valuable. A lot of companies are buying and selling it without you even knowing what's going on. And it's not just platforms. Data brokers do this with your personal information directly, your name, phone number, relatives, surfing habits. It's scraped from public
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records and resold on people's search sites and shady directories. It's all just kind of out there, available to anyone who's willing to pay for it. And the number of data breaches is rising every year. So the risk of your
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information being caught up in one of these keeps growing. That's where Incogn comes in. They track down where your personal data is exposed, and they send removal requests on your behalf across hundreds of known data brokers. And if
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you find your data somewhere they don't automatically cover, their custom removals feature lets you send them the link, and they'll handle it from there.
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Since that data tends to creep back, they also keep removing it on repeat. So, if the idea of your info being bought and sold without your consent bothers you, this is worth doing. You can take back your personal data with
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Incogn. Go to incogn.com/elephants and use code elephants and get 60% off their annual plan. All right, so back to nicotine. What does it do to the body that people find so appealing? First, it raises dopamine and norepinephrine, the
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chemicals behind alertness and focus. Researchers confirm that effect. Now, most of them put it roughly in the same range as a strong cup of coffee. It's real and measurable, but not really transformative. The dosing that biohackers talk about, none of them are
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doing it daily or in big amounts. They're doing it occasionally in small doses, closer to a double espresso before a long stretch of grunt work than a pack a day cigarette habit. Some in this space also point out to nicotine's
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appetite-suppressing effects since it mildly raises your metabolism. Now, if that pitch sounds familiar, it's because it's almost word for word the one cigarette companies used for decades to sell smoking to women and teenage girls especially. They said the nicotine would
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help them keep slim. And they weren't wrong. A lot of people gain weight after they stop smoking. But even Huberman, who's about as pro-nicotine as any credentialed scientist gets, doesn't pretend it's free of downsides. The most obvious one is addiction itself. And
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it's very addictive. But it's unclear just how much it takes and how often you have to use it before you find yourself really needing a daily fix. For pouches and gum, we just don't know yet. They're too new. But for cigarettes, we've got
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decades of science, and that's not reassuring. For years, the assumption was that dependence took months of daily use. But studies tracking kids from their very first cigarette have found some showing real symptoms of dependency within days or weeks, from as little as
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two cigarettes a week. Adults have more of a buffer, but the direction's the same. It's the same molecule hitting the same receptors, whether it's from a cigarette or a pouch. So, there's no chemical reason to expect pouches to be
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any different. But, we just don't have that data to prove it either way yet.
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What we have learned is that we've been blaming the wrong culprit for the dangers of cigarettes for as long as I've been alive, and nobody's really bothered to correct the record. Start with a number that's legitimately scary.
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Cigarette smoking kills almost a half million Americans every single year. Worldwide, it's something like 7 million. Nobody really disputes that.
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But the nicotine in a cigarette isn't what's killing people. It's a wrong notion that many people have, as I mentioned, including many in the medical system. That survey up top was from researchers at Ruckers who published it in 2021 and found 80% of doctors say
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that nicotine contributes to cancer. Some even blamed it for COPD, which is also not true. Among the general public, opinions kind of all over the map.
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Another survey, also by Ruckers, but more recently in 2026, found that depending purely on the phrasing, the share of Americans who got it right swung from 10% to 80%. So all over the map. And here's the thing that makes
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this wild. The science pointing away from nicotine really isn't new at all. Back in the 1920s and 30s, a physician named Anel Roof, who ran Ar
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grew tumors. Then he did the same thing with nicotine alone, and nothing happened. A century ago, the tar, not the nicotine, was the known carcinogen.
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The distinction between the addictive part and the deadly part, has been part of the scientific record since well before World War II. So, how did we get to the point where nicotine became the demon? Well, part of it's real. Nicotine
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is the reason cigarettes are so hard to quit. It's genuinely one of the most addictive substances people regularly put into their bodies. And the industry itself didn't help untangle things. In 1994, seven tobacco company CEOs sat in front of Congress, raised their right
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hand, and testified under oath that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive. Just yes or no. Do you believe nicotine is not addictive? I believe nicotine is not addictive. Yes, Mr. Johnston.
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Uh, Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no intoxication.
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We'll take that as a known. And this is also why people dismissed a lot of the research from back then.
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Nobody believed them. And the fallout from that testimony also helped cement nicotine specifically as public enemy number one. So, for most of the last century, nicotine and cigarette have basically functioned as the same word.
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In public health messaging, in law, and how your grandmother talked about it at the dinner table, the two got fused into one thing. Once something that addictive sits at the center of something that deadly, it's an easy, almost automatic
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leap to assume the addictive part is also the deadly part. But that's just not how the chemistry works. California still playing it into that hype. I was at a movie recently and before the film they showed a ad produced by the state
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which was part of a $5 million statewide campaign targeting what they call big nicotine and it was one of those disgusting close-ups of eyes, close-ups of of gross gums. And that confusion has real costs in the real world. Nicotine
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patches and gums that was designed to help people quit smoking still carry a lot of warning labels. And those aren't necessarily untrue, but to the extent they keep people smoking, that's a bad problem. Vapes ran into the same wall
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when they first showed up. In 2008, the World Health Organization said there wasn't enough scientific evidence to back up the claims that ecigarettes were safer than regular cigarettes. A year later, the FDA went further and tried to block their import into the United
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States entirely. That was overturned by the courts. And here's the part that's a little hard to swallow in hindsight because while regulators were trying to treat the new vapes like a drug, they went on to outperform the FDA's own
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approved nicotine replacement therapies like patches, gums, and lozenes. Hey, look. I tried to get every fact right here, and my sources are down in the notes, but if I slipped up somewhere, let me know, and I'll fix it in the
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comment section below. All right, so the exit ramp is what alternate nicotine products really became for millions of smokers. For many, it was the main thing that helped them get off cigarettes for good. But to understand it, we should
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first look at the chemistry because cigarette smoke contains thousands of chemicals and dozens of them are known to be carcinogens, although not nicotine. The FDA itself has now put that in writing. As of this year, the agency authorized ZIN to be marketed
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using a specific claim that using ZIN instead of cigarettes puts you at a lower risk of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphyma, and chronic bronchitis. It's worth being exact about what that claim covers because it's about switching from
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cigarettes. It's not a blanket declaration that nicotine is safe for everybody. And the FDA has been very careful not to say that. Here's some more data. Researchers have pulled together well over a hundred clinical trials with more than 60,000 people
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total, all of them smokers trying to quit. Some of them got nicotine replacement tools, others got placeos.
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The nicotine groups, they succeeded at quitting long-term at rates roughly 50 to 60% higher than the placebo group.
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Those results hold up regardless of setting or country. Same story with vaping. In a major clinical trial, smokers who used ecigarettes had better success in stopping smoking altogether.
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Several countries have done this at a national scale. Sweden pouches replaced cigarettes there on a massive scale despite complaints from the EU which banned them in 1992. Sweden only sells them because it negotiated an exemption while joining the union in 1995. Every
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other country in the EU is still legally barred from selling the product that helped drive Sweden's smoking rate to below 4%. It's the first country in Europe to drop below 5%, the threshold that the WHO says is smoke-free. Swedish
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men now have lung cancer mortality about 60% below the European average. And the pattern isn't just Sweden. Norway saw its own smoking rates fall to about 7% on the same kind of switch. Japan tested it with an entirely different product,
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heated tobacco that arrived in 2014. And in the years after, cigarette sales fell twice as fast as before. Different countries, different products, but the same direction. Now, let's look beyond nicotine as just an aid to stop people from smoking. Let's talk about nicotine
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as medicine. I mean, it sounds like a contradiction, but for the last 30 years, serious researchers have tested it out as exactly that. The question now is whether nicotine on its own does anything actively good for you beyond
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that cup of coffee focus I talked about. Nicotine raises your heart rate and blood pressure and constricts your blood vessels as a stimulant. It also helps delay sleep and it reduces deep sleep.
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That's nicotine acting on a healthy body. But researchers also spent decades asking a more strange question. Could that same chemical actually treat a diagnosed disease? The answer on this is it's very mixed. It runs from promising to a full-on scientific dead ends,
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sometimes for the exact same condition. So, get this. People with schizophrenia smoke at dramatically higher rates than the general population. One serious hypothesis is that they often have trouble focusing and that they're self-medicating a concentration problem.
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Smokers have also shown lower rates of Parkinson's disease. Now, these are similar brain receptors, so that got scientists excited. They tested nicotine seriously for Parkinson's, cognitive decline ADHD schizophrenia depression, even Tourette's. Now, some of the early small studies and animal
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studies were promising, but most didn't hold up later. Scientists now think that other components in smoking, maybe the carbon monoxide, might work together in a way that they just don't yet understand. So, it's not a clean sweep of failure, but drug companies are
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worried because it's nicotine. I mean, it still carries an addiction risk. it still has some potential cardiovascular cost and they just don't want to be the ones selling the next nicotine tablets next to aspirin. So something's going to
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have to come out and show that it really works well for them to cross that Rubicon. All right, so let's look at some of the many unsettled questions because while it might not be the killer we thought, whether it's harmless is a
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separate question entirely and that's still open. Again, people like Hubberman, AIA, Aspirin, they're all using small occasional doses. You know, they're not doing regular daily high- strength pouches. There's a mechanical reason the small and occasional part matters. Sustained nicotine use
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increases the density of nicotinic receptors in the brain. They're what create the addictive craving for more.
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So, a dose that worked last month stops registering as a boost and starts being what normal requires. It's a straightforward tolerance effect, the same kind that shows up with caffeine or cannabis, just faster and stronger. So, what specifically is that effect they're
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chasing? A 2010 meta analysis pulled together every reliable study on nicotine's cognitive effects. It found real measurable enhancements in six specific areas: fine motor control, short-term memory, and above all, two particular kinds of attention. alerting attention, which is basically raw
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vigilance, and orienting attention, the ability to redirect focus onto whatever matters most right now. That's a very narrow kind of boost. There's nothing there about creativity or deep insight.
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But it's staying locked in and being able to direct focus during long monotonous stretches. There are also more open questions on the individual health side. The short-term cardiovascular effects, it raises heart rate, raises blood pressure. Those are proven, but what's less settled is the
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long-term cardiovascular risk from nicotine alone, isolated from smoke, because that data is just thinner and newer than cancer research. There's also a newer complaint showing up in dental offices. Nicotine is a vaso constrictor wherever it sits, and a pouch rests
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directly against gum tissue for extended periods. Dentists are now reporting gum recession and localized tissue damage tied into that. Again, not a large body of research, but an early pattern to be aware of. There's also questions relating to the vaping process itself.
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Heating any oil to vapor creates byproducts. Benzene, formaldahhide, compounds your lungs weren't built to handle. And vape pens, most have a metal coil that heats up hundreds of degrees each time you hit it, and that sheds microscopic particles of nickel,
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chromium, and lead into your body. What does that do to lungs over 20 years? We really don't know because the pens just haven't been around that long. But there may be hardware issues with the delivery. There is one data point that's
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pretty clear though, and it's around age. Nicotine exposure during pregnancy and adolescence affects brain development directly through the physical rewiring of the prefrontal cortex while it's still under construction. At that age, it alters the circuits responsible for attention and
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impulse control and raises the odds of lifelong addiction more than the same exposure would as an adult. That's a serious problem. And in fairness to the California ad people, teen and young adult use has been climbing. So, a lot
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of these things don't have an answer, but that one, it actually does. All right, so how do we wrap all this up?
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I'd say if you're a smoker and are already addicted to nicotine, shifting to ways that won't kill you as quickly as smoking is an absolute no-brainer.
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Nicotine isn't the villain we were taught it was, but that just also doesn't make that a health supplement either. It's an addictive stimulant that gives some people a real but modest edge, and anyone who does it really seems like they should do it in small
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doses and with their eyes open about the trade-off. For me, given the unknowns and the potential for addiction, I'd think long and hard before jumping into something like that was such a minor benefit. Look, I've seen too many
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smokers huddled out in the cold getting a fix they thought they could once control. And speaking of things that are hard to control, how about food? I was struck by the notion that for almost all of human history, people who were poor
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were more likely to be underweight. I mean, that just kind of makes sense. But now in wealthier countries, it's the exact opposite. Poverty and obesity go handin hand. So why? I answered that in this video. And I discovered that the
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common answers, the ones that we hear, aren't really the honest answers. If the link's not there, it'll be down below.
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Hey, I'm Ken Leort. Thank you so much for sticking with me through this. I hope you found it valuable. And until next time.
Topics:nicotinesmokingcanceraddictionbiohackingcognitive enhancementhealth misinformationharm reductionnicotine gumpublic health
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