Idea is as follows:

Subject is addicted to nicotine in cigarettes.
Subject chooses food that he has never tasted before.
Instead of putting nicotine in patch, subject applies proper amount of nicotine to select food (scheduled by physician).
Because the brain has never experienced this food before, the brain will associate this taste to relief of craving.
Nicotine is phased out; now the subject craves that food.
Hope you chose something healthy.

The flavor of the food should be something memorable and audacious, like a tart lime.
-- Cuit_au_Four, Mar 18 2007

Hmm... Well think about it this way. The reason why "lite" cigarettes do not work is because the user subconsciously just covers the little smoke escape holes with his lips while smoking in order to get more nicotine. If your theory was correct, though, then the person shouldn't do that, since when phasing to lite cigarettes, they would associate the relief of craving still with the cigarette, not the nicotine level itself.

In short, people are very well attuned to nicotine levels, and I don't see why phasing down the food would be any easier than phasing down a patch or anything else. They're going to notice the phasing just as much.

As a side note, classic conditioning does NOT require that the stimulus be something you have never encountered before. In fact, you can train a given stimulus to a response and then reverse it and then retrain it and then reverse it a dozen times a day for some types of simple, shallow associations, if you feel like it. So you could pick any food you wanted, even something that the person already eats all the time. Actually, picking something that they like already might even work better.
-- Smurfsahoy, Mar 18 2007


Ace!
-- po, Mar 18 2007


While I was in China, a restaurant in Beijing was given a heavy fine. The restaurant was fined because the owners had been putting opium in with the noodles, to stir up more repeat business.
-- imaginality, Mar 18 2007


/Idea is as follows:/

I suspected that might be the case.
-- Texticle, Mar 18 2007


I don't see this as helping you to quit smoking. If I start to associate a nicotine high with apples, I won't deassociate it from cigarettes unless given a reason. When apples don't work anymore I'll return to cigs.

However, here's a bun for the sentence "Hope you chose something healthy." Nicotine doping may be a whole new way of helping people move towards a healthier diet.
-- placid_turmoil, Mar 18 2007


Four, just out of curiosity, have you ever smoked (and indeed quit), or are you talking completely out of your arse?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 18 2007


What if the food was gum?
-- ColonelMuffins, Mar 21 2007


I find that whenever I quit smoking ("It's easy, I've done it 100 times!) any food is quit-smoking food.

Now I find that: the risk of dying from obesity, subtracted from the risk of dying from smoking, added to the negative of the risk of dying in a fist-fight because I 'm VERY, VERY CRANKY, roughly equals the risk of premature death from the ol' coffin nails.
-- m_Al_com, Mar 21 2007



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