Smoking and Appetite Suppression

Posted By elissa on May 7, 2011 | 1 comment

It’s no secret that some people – young women in particular – take up smoking to facilitate weight control. It’s also no secret that tobacco companies have worked long and hard to create the impression that smoking will help keep you svelte.

As it turns out, there may be more than just marketing involved. According to a recent paper published in the European Journal of Public Health, tobacco companies actually added appetite suppressants to their products. As the Independent summarizes:

British and American tobacco companies deliberately added powerful appetite-suppressing chemicals to cigarettes to attract people worried about their weight, according to internal industry documents dating from 1949 to 1999. Chemical additives are just one of several strategies successfully used by tobacco companies over the past 50 years to convince people that smoking makes you thin.

Tobacco giants Philip Morris and British American Tobacco added appetite suppressants to cigarettes, according to the documents, released during litigation in the US. Four other major companies tested potential chemicals, including amphetamine and nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas, but the documents, which are incomplete, do not reveal if such chemicals were ever added and sold to the public.

…Professor David Hammond, a tobacco industry expert at Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada, said: “We know the industry explored ways to exploit concerns about weight loss back in the Sixties, because they knew it was an issue that concerned women, who they wanted to recruit as smokers. We don’t know if appetite-suppressing molecules are still added, because compliance with additive regulations is poor and sensitive internal documents are usually shredded.”

The paper covers the period 1949 – 1999, so who knows what “Big Tobacco” is up to now? For all we know, they’re still doing it.