AMA #23: All Things Nicotine: deep dive into its cognitive and physical benefits, risks, and mechanisms of action

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Welcome to Ask Me Anything AMA episode number 23 I'm joined once again by Bob Kaplan. In today's episode, we discuss nicotine and all things related to nicotine.
We talk about smoking, of course, and we talk about how nicotine works. Turns out nicotine is a super complicated and very interesting molecule. It has effects in the brain, it has effects in the body. We talk about how nicotine works and we talk about what the studies say about its benefits to people. That might sound like a contradictory term, given that we know tobacco is so harmful. But in this episode, we distill all of that into something that I hope is digestible.
If you're a subscriber and you wanna watch the full video of this podcast, you can find it in the show notes. And if you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on YouTube. So without further delay, I hope you'll enjoy AMA number.
23

**Bob Kaplan** (1:38)
Hey, Peter.

**Peter Attia** (1:39)
Hey, man, how are you?

**Bob Kaplan** (1:41)
I'm doing well. How are you?

**Peter Attia** (1:43)
Good, except for the fact that my shin is on fire. It is killing me at the moment. I think you know, I've discovered recently the use of long high socks for sumo deadlifts, which has been a game changer. And then today, when I was doing my warmup set, I just forgot to put the socks on.
So I literally had 135 pounds on the bar, and two reps into it ripped a hole in my shins that by the time I put the bar down, there was blood down to the floor. And I was like, dude, how could you forget to put your socks on, like your magic favorite socks? So anyway, I'm lamenting my badness there, but other than that, I'm good.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:26)
That's good. I don't think we have any questions around that, but I do have a question. Do you do sumo deadlift? Do you do a standard as well, and you still use in your hex bar?

**Peter Attia** (2:34)
I go back and forth. So I used to love to deadlift twice a week, alternating two of the three between a sumo, a standard and a hex bar. And I go in phases.
Like right now, I'm really loving sumo, and I've fallen out of love with trap bar. I don't know why. I just was having trouble kind of finding it again, and whereas I feel really good in the sumo, and I actually haven't done straight bar in probably like six months, like a traditional narrow stance straight bar. But I like mixing them up. I sort of think deadlift is... If you could only... It's this sort of silly, unrealistic question. If you could only do one exercise, what would it be? It would definitely be variations of deadlifts for me.
Hey, that rhymed.

**Bob Kaplan** (3:22)
That's very nice. It's poetic.

**Peter Attia** (3:24)
I'm good like that. We have an interesting episode today.

**Bob Kaplan** (3:29)
We do, we do. We consolidated a bunch of questions around nicotine. We street a bunch of questions and typically people will just, I think, would say, I don't think people would ask, you know, is smoking bad for you? But there actually are a lot of questions around nicotine and are there benefits to nicotine? And in particular, we got questions around that people have heard about it improving cognition. And if that's possible, is there any literature on that? There's also a question about nicotine improving fat oxidation and can it actually help with weight loss?
And another one, which is really interesting that I think we'll get to is, is it possible that smoking is protective against COVID-19?

**Peter Attia** (4:11)
Yeah, this is where I think the AMAs are fun because that turned into a really interesting deep dive and I would have never even thought of that. So it was nice to see a whole bunch of people had asked that question. And then, of course, we got to look into it.
You know, I said before we jump into this, I will just say from a personal standpoint, I became interested in nicotine about maybe 11 years ago and realized that if you could strip away the addictive nature of nicotine, and we'll get into that a little bit more, the actual molecule was quite interesting and started chewing nicotine gum intermittently. And obviously, if anybody's ever chewed nicotine gum, who's not a smoker, you realize you gotta go really easy because it can make you quite nauseous and things like that.