“Tobacco today, keeps the doctor away”……as they say.
As time has gone on, I think nicotine has been minimized for what was once thought to be long term health impacting. There is some literature out there moving away from the condemnation of it and focused more on tobacco itself. Outside of the addictiveness that impacts some more than others and drives more tobacco use, nicotine in and of itself seems to be less concern.
There's a lot of correlation that can be made between nicotine and caffeine. In the case of caffeine, over time the body adjusts to the body + caffeine and normalizes out. It too impacts blood vessels on usage with similar withdrawal effects when removed, yet there are zero restrictions on its use or pushed long term health detriments from its consumption.
The FDA itself over the last few years have worded many of their articles to condemning tobacco, yet not nicotine very specifically. There are even FDA approved and cleared safe products specifically to deliver nicotine without the hazards of
tobacco use.
Smoking cessation products are shown to help people quit smoking and can even double your chance of quitting successfully.
www.fda.gov
There's a number of recent articles on the FDA site where it's very clearly focused on
smoking and not nicotine (other than it's addictive potential, but not health related).
The most interesting article I've found recently was that Scotland has actually put on their national health page that they consider nicotine relatively harmless and have put the focus directly on the usage of tobacco.
Information on what's in tobacco products, how they're taken and their side effects.
www.nhsinform.scot
That's not to say it won't impact someone negatively, but I think it's being accepted that nicotine itself isn't the culprit of most of the health impacts from tobacco use. It's everything else in tobacco and more and more articles continue to come out by government and health organizations depicting that thought.
