Opinion: Inhale That Carrot
July 9, 2012 
Regular readers of this column know that I’ve preached any number of ways to boost sales of vegetables, with the most recent being they will help you lose weight and make your skin look more attractive. Here’s one that may be the topper: They can help you avoid a premature, most unpleasant death.
A new study by University of Buffalo public health researchers states that if you’re trying to quit smoking, eating more fruits and vegetables may help you quit and stay tobacco-free for longer.
The paper, which appeared in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, is the first longitudinal study on the relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and smoking cessation. (One great thing about Wikipedia is that I can throw around terms like “longitudinal study” and actually know what they mean: “A longitudinal study is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time — often many decades.” Or at least that’s what one person thinks it means, but that’s a column for another day.)
The authors surveyed 1,000 smokers aged 25 and older from around the country. They followed up with the respondents 14 months later, asking them if they had abstained from tobacco use during the previous month.
“Other studies have taken a snapshot approach, asking smokers and nonsmokers about their diets,” Gary A. Giovino, chairman of the Department of Community Health and Health Behavior said in a university news release. “We knew from our previous work that people who were abstinent from cigarettes for less than six months consumed more fruits and vegetables than those who still smoked. What we didn’t know was whether recent quitters increased their fruit and vegetable consumption or if smokers who ate more fruits and vegetables were more likely to quit.”
Crunch ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
The only downside of this that I can see is I have to admit my sister was right. She quit smoking through hypnosis, but that didn’t seem to take completely. So every time she had an urge to puff on a cigarette she would crunch a stick of celery, carrot, or jicama — hey, this is California — instead. It worked for her, and I guess she wasn’t the only one.
The study found that smokers who consumed the most fruit and vegetables were three times more likely to be tobacco-free for at least 30 days than those consuming the lowest amount of fruits and vegetables. These findings persisted even when adjustments were made to take into account age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, household income, and health orientation.
They also found that smokers with higher fruit and vegetable consumption smoked fewer cigarettes per day, waited longer to smoke their first cigarette of the day, and scored lower on a common test of nicotine dependence. The study’s authors say they’re not sure of the exact explanation. Who cares?
Spread the news: Eat Vegetables — Live Longer.
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