This article was posted on CNN.com. It is sickening to read how women were targeted because of their “neuroticism” as objects of campaigns to get them to start smoking cigarettes. Cigarette manufacturers even wanted to add appetite suppressants to those slim, low tar and nicotine cigarettes so they could market them as a weight control program! Of course men have been the targets of cigarette ads for years as well, as far back as the days of the “Marlboro Man”. If you know a person who is trying to quit or has quit and still really wants to smoke, show them this article so they get good and mad. Then help them to quit with herbal support.
Lobelia contains a natural, safer form of nicotine and helps replace that addictive component found in cigarettes. It comes in capsules and liquid. We like to recommend the liquid since you can really control the amount you are comfortable using. Just a drop or two in a glass of water goes a long way to replace that nasty habit and give a person the stress relief they crave. For women, there is also a small amount of Lobelia in the Female Corrective Combination called FCS-II. This is a great de-stresser and hormonal balancer at the same time!
Nicotinamide and Nicotinic acid are part of the B-Complex of vitamins which is the reason that cigarettes produce their calming effect. Supplementing with B-Complex and specific B Vitamins like Pantothenic Acid can relieve the stress that makes you reach for a cigarette. Pantothenic Acid is Vitamin B-5 and it helps to relieve tics and twitches, even spasms and repetitive motions like tapping, chewing on your lip, clenching teeth, blinking and more. These are all sign of deficiencies that cause the desire to find stress relief in that cigarette in the first place.
There are also homeopathics called Tobacco Detox in both tablet and liquid form that replace the harmful form of nicotine with the natural beneficial type. They are great to have since a person can use them anytime that a craving hits.
Cigarette manufacturers use a sugar-curing process when making cigarettes. This is the reason for the sugar cravings when a person wants to quit. Using Stevia can help satisfy the need for something sweet with no calories and no glycemic effect. Weight gain after quitting is the number one reason that people go back to smoking. In addition to the fact that they are serious poisons, artificial sweeteners actually make you hungry and slow down your thyroid making the problem of weight gain even worse. Use of artificial sweeteners has been linked to manic depression and other conditions so they should be avoided like the plague!
Studies show that stress has been linked to weight gain, causing the body to produce increased levels of cortisol for extended periods. The new Cortisol Formula is not only a great benefit for weight loss and control, but also an important component in any stress relief program, thereby replacing the need for a cigarette.
Study: Cigarette makers targeted women
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 9:53 AM EDT (1353 GMT)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Tobacco companies designed cigarettes to appeal to women's desires to be thin and healthy in ways that went "far beyond marketing and advertising," health researchers said Monday.
They said internal documents released by tobacco companies under a 1998 court settlement show the companies created cigarettes, including "slim" and so-called "light" brands, in part to attract women.
"These internal documents reveal that the tobacco industry's targeting of women goes far beyond marketing and advertising," said Carrie Murray Carpenter of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study.
Writing in the June issue of the journal Addiction, Carpenter and colleagues said their study of tobacco company documents show a clear effort to find out what might make women want to smoke.
The firms also considered putting appetite suppressants into cigarettes so they could promote them as weight control products, they said.
"How unfortunate that the industry used these findings to exploit women and not help them. Cigarette designs and ingredients were manipulated in an effort to make cigarettes more palatable to women and to complement advertising allusions of smooth, healthy, weight-controlling, stress-reducing smoke," Jack Henningfield of Johns Hopkins University and colleagues wrote in a commentary.
Carpenter's team said tobacco companies' efforts to attract women included the creation of "slim" cigarettes in the 1970s.
"These studies demonstrate that marketing strategies, especially for female brands, have contributed to the association of smoking with appealing attributes including female liberation, glamour, success and thinness," they wrote.
Internal documents
Carpenter's team sifted through more than 7 million internal tobacco industry documents made public through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the state attorneys general and major U.S. tobacco manufacturers including Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA unit, Reynolds American Inc. and British American Tobacco Plc (BAT).
Tobacco companies also targeted "light" cigarette brands, with their promise of smaller amounts of harmful tar and nicotine, to women torn between the desire to smoke and health worries.
"We can safely conclude that the strength of cigarettes that are purchased by women is related to their degree of neuroticism," the paper cites one 1982 BAT document as reading. "Women buy cigarettes in order to help them cope with neuroticism."
A 1985 Philip Morris document reads: "(Women) do not want to stop smoking, yet they are guilt-ridden with concerns for their families if smoking should badly damage their own health. Thus they compromise by smoking low-tar cigarettes."
Understanding what the companies have done, Carpenter's team said, is key to finding ways to help women quit smoking.
In the United States, 19 percent of adult women and 24 percent of adult men smoke, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Smoking is the single biggest cause of heart disease and cancer.
Spokespeople for Philip Morris and Altria said they had not seen the full reports and could not immediately comment.
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