Girls Start Smoking While Dieting




The motives to start smoking are different for various groups of people. Some feel stress and need to cope with it as they used to do in childhood: by sticking something in their mouths, but instead of a pacifier, adults prefer cigarettes. Some start the habit because they want to be “like everybody else” or because they want to “look cool”. Some people try to smoke because they think cigarettes can keep them in good shape.

It has been a proven fact that people do not want to give up smoking because they are afraid they would gain weight, but a new research done by University of Florida specialists has proven that many teenage girls start smoking after they try dieting.

American Journal of Health Promotion has published the study which involved 8,000 adolescents. Considering all previous work the researchers knew that females dieted more often than males and that smoking was closely related to their weight loss plans. It was different in boys: they were more likely to start smoking out of a challenge or when they found cigarettes being available to them.

Smoking suppresses appetite, so dieting and smoking at the same time really motivated teen girls, but boys have different tendency. The leader of the research said that boys would be “inactive dieters, those who first started dieting and then stopped” and only after this they were coming to cigarettes. It has also been noticed that boys would smoke more often just because they could find cigarettes somewhere: take them from smoking parents or ask older friends to buy them some.

As for the girls, they saw really big benefit in the fact that nicotine increased metabolism and therefore was potentially excellent for weight loss. Highly advertised idea of female beauty in slim body only increased the chances for girls to start smoking.

The researchers took into consideration the data collected between April 1994 and August 1996. During this time 7,795 teenagers from the seventh, eighth and ninth grades were tested. First of all their body mass index was checked which showed whether the young people were overweight. The adolescents were also asked if they were trying to lose weight, if they had easy access to cigarettes, if they have tried cigarettes for the first time during the study, what was their dieting plan and if they became regular smokers who smoked at least one cigarette a day for a month.

The study did not take into consideration the teens who had been smoking before the study started and those who preferred dieting by taking pills, vomiting or using other unhealthy ways to lose weight.

The results have shown that many girls would start smoking in order to keep low weight achieved by diets or to help losing even more pounds because they would smoke instead of having lunch or any other meal.

While the leader of the research, Mildred Maldonado-Molina, Ph.D., a UF assistant professor of epidemiology, explains the big number or teen-smokers who diet by increased metabolism, S. Bryn Austin, Sc. D., an assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of adolescent medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School has different opinion.

“It’s also possible that dieting itself is making people more vulnerable to smoking. If [animals] are extremely food-deprived, they will use more drugs,” Austin says. He bases his judgment on animal studies which showed strong connection between food deprivation and drugs.

The researchers do not think that parents should be alarmed if children start dieting, but it is important to see what kind of diet plan they chose, if it is a healthy one and help the teens to go through it without cigarettes.

Sean Porter

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Posted on December 11, 2009 
Filed Under Facts on Smoking, Smoking and Diet, Smoking and Health, Smoking and Women, Smoking and Youth

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