Transcription
What are the four things most likely to kill you? One of them is Alzheimer's. Well, if you don't want Alzheimer's, micro-dosing nicotine might be a great way to feel better now, have more energy, more focus, to lose weight, and to not get Alzheimer's.
Misusing nicotine can be bad for you. And not using nicotine can be bad for you. I consider nicotine to be as important as caffeine and ketosis. If you really want to have a brain that's going to last for more than a hundred years, and you want to feel like you love your life, it's that big of a difference. If you want to stay sharp with creativity, nicotine improves reaction time and vigilance. It makes it easier to pay attention.
Now, what's the difference between smoking and taking a pharmaceutical nicotine product? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Here's the deal. Nicotine has gotten a bad rap. In 1986, Dr. Newhouse from Vanderbilt University published the first groundbreaking study that said pharmaceutical nicotine, not smoking, not chewing tobacco, but pharmaceutical nicotine reversed Alzheimer's disease in patients. And since then, we've all confused tobacco, which is bad for you, with nicotine, which at low doses has profound beneficial health effects. Because of this research, I started using nicotine at the very beginning of starting the biohacking movement. 1 milligram per day. Now, a cigarette has 12 to 20 milligrams per day. This is a tiny micro-dose, a little mint. And the difference in my brain function, my focus was profound. And for 5 years, I used 1 milligram a day. And then I said, "I really like this." And the research is getting better and better. So I'm going to use two. And today, I recommend a little bit more than that. And there are profound benefits to nicotine that have nothing to do with smoking. They are not pro-cancer. They are anti-Alzheimer's. They're pro-metabolic. And I want you to understand this because misusing nicotine can be bad for you. And not using nicotine can be bad for you. I consider nicotine to be as important as caffeine and ketosis. If you really want to have a brain that's going to last for more than 100 years and you want to feel like you love your life, it's that big of a difference. It's just very different from the world of addiction that you're probably thinking about right now.
And here's the deal. I am an unlicensed biohacker, author of multiple New York Times bestselling science books, and I've changed the way we talk about health with the biohacking movement. But I'm not a doctor. And nicotine is addictive, especially if you do it above the levels I'm going to talk about in this episode. It'll raise your heart rate and your blood pressure. Don't use it if you're pregnant. Don't use it if you're a kid. Don't use it if you have any contraindicated condition, especially if you know you have cancer. At that point, if you're following Western cancer treatments, nicotine might not be good for you. If you're following alternative treatments, there's an argument for it. And this entire episode is about nicotine. Not smoking, not chewing, not snuff, nothing. It's not tobacco. It's nicotine.
Here's what we're going to learn in today's episode. Talk a little bit about the history of nicotine because it has just played an incredibly important role in the evolution of consciousness, really. And we're going to talk about the mechanism so you understand receptors, what your dopamine does and doesn't do with nicotine, and the anti-inflammatory effect of nicotine. We'll talk about human data, risks of nicotine, and who should avoid it, how to get it, delivery methods that are not going to cause more problems than the benefits. And we'll talk about personalization, stacks, and what synergizes with nicotine, and how to avoid tolerance or dependence, and what to do if you do have dependence. And I'll teach you the protocols for micro-dosing, for deep work, and for tapering. And then I'll summarize it all for you at the end because, well, I am a good teacher, or at least I like to think so. So, with no further ado, let's talk about nicotine and let's not talk about smoking.
Nicotine is a plant alkaloid and it is a defense chemical, just like caffeine, just like polyphenols. Like most of the beneficial medical effects from plants are plants designing themselves to not be overconsumed by insects, fungus, bacteria, or other animals. So the right chemical at the right dose made by a plant can have profound beneficial or negative effects on you depending on the dose, depending on the plant, depending on the chemical. And what nicotine does is it binds to the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. These are go switches for attention, arousal, and learning in the brain. You've probably heard of acetylcholine because it's a stimulatory neurotransmitter. And even the nootropics that I designed that are there for cognitive enhancement, they increase acetylcholine levels just a little bit. And that's what nicotine is doing by binding to those receptors and activating them.
Now, nicotine is just not smoking. The disease burden from tobacco largely comes from combustion products, not pharmaceutical-grade nicotine. It's also worth noting that most tobacco plants have high amounts of cadmium in them from the soil, but nicotine when it's purified doesn't have that. Nicotine is not risk-free, much like life. But it is addictive, also much like life. But nicotine is not classified as a human carcinogen by itself. Combustion is the problem along with some of the other things that come from combustion like tar. Think about it like this: Acetylcholine is your brain's laser pointer for attention. And these acetylcholine receptors are the light switches. So small amounts of nicotine flip a switch so it's a bit brighter.
Can we talk about the history of nicotine? It has a beautiful ritual use. You might have heard of Ayahuasca or shamans who use Ayahuasca, and I've interviewed many on the show. But there's another type called a tobacco. These are people who use in the jungle ancient forms of tobacco with far more nicotine than what we normally expect in the West, and they take it until they hallucinate and they go to the same places that we go with these Ayahuasca journeys. A very, very deep work, and it has been revered for its ability to help us get into the spiritual world, especially in North American shamanistic practices, and we've used smoking as a way to connect with others for a long time. I don't recommend smoking, and I'm actually trained by a medicine person to administer Hapé, which is a powdered form of tobacco. I wouldn't do that very often, but I don't mind doing that if I'm sitting around a fire and we're connecting with our ancestors. That's how you do it. And there is nothing wrong with that. I actually have a practice to honor the spirit of tobacco, which actually still wants to help us even with all the mean things we've done to tobacco over the years. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the extract of tobacco, nicotine.
Why would we call it nicotine? Because in 1560, Jean Nicot, Nico, Nicotine, brought to French court, and they named it nicotine because of him. In 1828, another couple of these French and now German people, this is Posselt and Reimann, isolated pure nicotine from tobacco. This 1800s, it's very long ago. And it was a colorless oil and very potent. And then Jean Stas in 1850 developed the first forensic nicotine detection. So we could actually figure out whether it's in something. And it wasn't until the 20th century that we started making industrial cigarettes. Until then, you'd roll your own or have a cigar, or you'd just chew on it, or you'd use snuff. And the problem was when we started making industrial cigarettes, we started getting tar and benzopyrenes. And modern cigarettes have hundreds of added ingredients, some of which radically increase the addictiveness of smoking versus nicotine.
The washout period for nicotine is 3 days for a physiological addiction, same as caffeine. You quit caffeine, and you're going to have headaches for 3 days, and then it gets better. If you're taking low-dose pharmaceutical nicotine and you stop taking it, your washout period is 3 days. If you do high-dose pharmaceutical nicotine, it's a little bit more complex. Where we are today is we have these nicotine replacement products, things like gum, although most gum has bad sweeteners in it and even one sweetener that's particularly addictive. We have patches with nothing addictive but nicotine itself, but you don't really feel the kick as hard. And we have sprays and we have these little um microlastic packets that go up in your gum, things like Zyn. So, I don't recommend those, but in a pinch, maybe.
So, it's time as biohackers and as people interested in longevity that we take a serious look at nicotine as a nootropic and a longevity anti-aging drug. And this is particularly important if you read "Superhuman," my big longevity book. Well, what are the four things most likely to kill you? One of them is Alzheimer's. Well, if you don't want Alzheimer's, micro-dosing nicotine might be a great way to feel better now, have more energy, more focus, to lose weight. Oh, and to not get Alzheimer's.
Let's get a little bit sciency about how nicotine works. So there are different subtypes of acetylcholine receptors. There's alpha 4, beta 2, high affinity, and alpha 7, which are fast calcium ion permeable. And these are important for cognition. If you want your brain to work, you have to hit those receptor subtypes. Why do we need to do that? Because in your prefrontal cortex, where your conscious thinking really happens, your ability to regulate your emotions, and to a certain extent in your thalamus, you can get a better signal-to-noise. You feel locked in but not buzzed. And if you chronically use nicotine, people who just are constantly taking it all day long at high doses, you get desensitized. And when that happens, you get upregulation in days. So then you kind of get dependence. So, a quick tap on a key would improve typing. Holding it down until it sticks doesn't work. That's what desensitization is. And if your brain adds more keys, you get upregulation of your receptors.
One of the most pleasurable parts about nicotine, even low dose, is that it excites these inputs to your midbrain dopamine neurons. Why would you care about that? Because if you turn up dopamine in the midbrain, you like your life. A modest bump in that will increase your motivation and it makes it easier to stay on track. It is not like an amphetamine or a sledgehammer. It is subtle at low dose, but it's just like, "Wow, everything just got easier." And that reward assist does contribute to habit formation because we like it when things just feel like they have less effort required for them.
So this is about dopamine, but those alpha 7 receptors in your brain are also on your immune cells in the brain and everywhere else. And when you activate those with low-dose pharmaceutical nicotine, it's like a brake pedal on inflammation, which lowers something called TNF alpha, which is a primary inflammatory cytokine. And if you've read my books or heard other episodes of the show, you know that inflammation is expressed in different types of cytokines. And you might remember that TNF alpha is a primary cause of inflammation, especially with autoimmunity and with aging. So lower TNF alpha is one reason that nicotine likely contributes to longevity and certainly is anti-Alzheimer's. And guess what other part of your body uses that pathway? The vagus nerve. This is something that controls whole-body inflammation. I've done probably six or seven episodes on vagus nerve stimulation with Dr. Steven Porges, who's a leader in the field on that, and we just talked recently about how there's 200,000 different parts of the vagus nerve. And I've talked about ZenBud, the new ultrasonic vagus nerve stimulator. All of these are about controlling the vagus nerve. But nicotine, well, because it uses this alpha 7 receptor, it affects the vagus nerve for less inflammation on the thing that controls the whole body. And tiny doses can actually surprisingly make you feel calmer, and you can feel much less muscle and body ache from low dose. Conversely, if you take a high dose, you will barf.
Many, many years ago, my first podcast producer, she heard about nicotine on the first episode. So, she took a 25 milligram patch and she stuck it on, and an hour later calls me and goes, "This is the best day of my entire adult life. I love everything." And she called me an hour later and said, "My face is green and I'm barfing." There you go. Don't overdose.
Now, let's talk about something called pharmacokinetics, which is something that you should learn about for any supplement or any medication you're using. Go to your favorite AI that you trust. It may not be ChatGPT anymore because it's a lying bastard. And look at that. That tells you how a medication is metabolized in your body and how long it's going to last. What that'll tell you is that nicotine has a half-life of about two hours. And if they were going to test you to see if you'd had nicotine, cotinine is the main breakdown product. It lasts for about 16 hours. And there are some that last for about 60 days. So if you're going for life insurance or something, you're going to have to go cold turkey for a while. And the speed of how nicotine hits you really affects how you feel. And the lungs are the fastest route. The oral route is pretty fast, but moderate. And the patch is slow and steady. So, if you want to get the metabolic benefits but not really the cognitive benefits, go for the patch. If you want to get pretty good benefits, go for a spray, which is not available in the US, unfortunately, or use something like a little mint that just goes up inside your lip.
So, what is it going to do? In scientific research, nicotine can increase your attention. It can improve your working memory. And they say really acute, like short-term improvements. And this is a meta-analysis of many different studies. They can be small to moderate. It's dependent on the type of task, and this is really important. It is a U-curve that's inverted. What that means is that if you have no nicotine, you don't perform very well. You have a little bit, you perform better. You get more, you don't get the improvements. So, you want to be at the Goldilocks zone. And if you're dealing with something called mild cognitive impairment, which is a huge number of people as we age, and a lot of people who just maybe got exposed to something against their will over the past 5 years, I can't imagine what that would be, but if you're one of those people, there's research showing that for non-smokers, 15 milligrams a day in a patch, which is moderate dose for 6 months, improved working memory, improved attention, and it doesn't cure things, but it's a credible signal that it's helping with mild cognitive impairment. So, you don't feel impaired. And this is really cool. If you want to stay sharp with creativity, nicotine improves reaction time and vigilance. It makes it easier to pay attention. And that anti-inflammatory signaling is my favorite effect because it's not going to give you full self-treatment of disease. But if you have a chronic low-grade inflammation signal like I did with a background of autoimmunity and weighing 300 pounds before I got on top of it, I feel better on low-dose nicotine. And I've gone off for months at a time. My life is better with low-dose nicotine in every way I can measure. So, of course, I'm going to use it.
So, here are the risks of nicotine. Again, not the risks of smoking. We're not talking about smoking in this episode. You could get addicted, and you will see receptor changes and dopamine reinforcement. And if you withdraw, it peaks around days 2 to 3 and it fades in 2 to 4 weeks. And you can have irritability, low focus, problem sleeping, you'd have cravings for nicotine. But there's a problem with this. If you're on high-dose oral nicotine, the withdrawal can also cause whole-body muscle tension and you get stuck that way for a long time. Which is why if you made the mistake of using six milligram Zyns every 5 minutes, well, you're going to have problems when you start doing it. So you gently, gently, gently taper off, ideally using patches. Do not go cold turkey. If you're on very high doses of nicotine, you will have muscle tension like you've never experienced in your life. Yes, I've tried it.
There's also from excessive nicotine cardiovascular strain. Your heart rate, blood pressure goes up. Never been an issue for me. I have low blood pressure. That's 'cause I'm a biohacker. So basically, if you have uncontrolled high blood pressure, you have had a recent heart attack, or you're having arrhythmias, you might want to avoid all stimulants, including nicotine. And if you do have uncontrolled high blood pressure, that is caused ultimately by insulin resistance. And nicotine may help with that, but do not do things that's going to increase your blood pressure to unsafe levels. And if you take nicotine in the afternoon and especially before bed and you're not used to it, it can fragment your sleep, lower your dream or REM sleep. And most people who aren't used to nicotine, if you do an overnight patch, you can expect really vivid dreaming.
And this is where it gets really interesting. We talk about metabolism. So many of the studies in the in the head of the paper, they completely talk about smoking and nicotine as if they're the same thing, even though smoking has a thousand compounds. And you'll see studies out there that say smoking causes insulin resistance, and they'll say, "Therefore, nicotine does," which is not scientific. Smoking causes insulin resistance because the smoking byproducts are bad for your mitochondria. And we know that you could just also breathe, I don't know, forest fire smoke and have the same problems with your mitochondria and therefore your insulin. So nicotine alone could impair receptor sensitivity. And if you're diabetic or insulin resistant, you can look what happens with the continuous glucose monitor. I haven't seen problems with it. And low-dose, not high-dose nicotine theoretically should help with insulin resistance. But if you start pounding it all the time, it's going to raise your stress hormone levels, which is going to move your insulin the wrong direction.
If you are pregnant, do not do this. It crosses the placenta. Nicotine can alter development. And if you're a teen, for God's sake, like nicotine is not for your brain. It needs to finish baking before you do that. And I know so many teenagers who've gotten into trouble, especially with vaping. Vaping is worse than smoking. Don't do that. There's so many other ways to experience pleasure than that. A friend of mine who hadn't tried much nicotine took a spray and suddenly just started barfing from 1 milligram. She was pregnant. Her body gave her a hard no on that. And using nicotine once if you're pregnant isn't the end of the world. Not by a long shot. It's just your body saying, "Don't put that in me anymore." And if you are pregnant and smoking, you must stop.
Earlier I mentioned nicotine is not a carcinogen, but it can stimulate signaling for angiogenesis. And angiogenesis is when the body builds more blood vessels. Now, angiogenesis is beneficial throughout the body. You want more blood flow in the brain. You want to grow new blood vessels, especially if you have some blocking of the arteries in your heart because of plaque or because you had COVID or something like that which causes damage to your arteries. So angiogenesis is good, but if you have cancer, cancer will also want angiogenesis to fuel tumor growth. So it's not a good idea to be on nicotine if you have cancer, especially if you're undergoing a cancer treatment that cuts off angiogenesis or creation of new blood vessels. However, if you're doing a metabolic treatment for your cancer, you should work with your cancer specialist. But if I had a tumor, I wouldn't do nicotine out of an abundance of caution. And most of the studies are on high dose, not low dose. And this really is important.
If you have delicious little mints, don't put them out where kids can get them. It can be poisoning. In fact, nicotine is ultimately there to keep insects from eating tobacco. And it does this because when you stimulate those acetylcholine receptors a little bit, it feels good. If you've ever seen a cockroach sprayed with poison and it starts like seizing up and twitching, that comes from excess acetylcholine. So, nicotine can kill adults and children and pets. So, keep it away from them.
Now, what's the difference between smoking and taking a pharmaceutical nicotine product? Cigarettes are way more addictive because smoke has something called an MAO inhibitor in them. It's actually something that's a part of Ayahuasca as well, and that can amplify your dopamine. You don't have MAO inhibitors in pharmaceutical nicotine.
Okay, so now you know you should probably try this if you want these types of benefits, but I haven't told you exactly the right dose yet. And I'm going to talk first, instead of dose, about how it gets in there because the speed that it gets in affects the dose. And here's the rule: The faster it hits you, the better it feels and the more habit-forming it is. Slower in is smoother and steadier. It's less grabby, but it also may be less focusing.
If you can do a gum of two to four milligrams, I recommend do the two milligram. You're going to feel it in 15, maybe 30 minutes. It's important that you chew on it and then park it. Three chews and just let it sit right up here. Do not just keep chewing it because number one, you'll look like a cow and you'll probably sound like one, too. But more importantly, you'll get all the dose in. It'll go down into your stomach, and then you might get nauseous from it. And most nicotine gum like Nicorette is full of crappy ingredients that I would never put in my body. The only safe gum that I know of is from a company called Lucy Gum. And full disclosure, many years ago, I wrote a very small check to be an investor and advisor in Lucy because I believe in the power of nicotine. So, I'm not trying to sell you on it here, just to mention that that is one of the brands that doesn't use bad sweeteners in some of their products, but sadly, some of them do have it.
You can also use a lozenge or a pouch. I do not recommend pouches right now because all of them, as far as I know of, have microplastics and you don't need a pouch, plus you have to spit it somewhere. You can get a similar effect from a lozenge. And lozenges offer deliver slightly more than gum. And pouches vary by branding. And the best lozenges, you just park them up here and they go away. My very favorite feel-good way to get it is an oral spray. Nicorette makes the only oral spray I've seen. It is approved in every country on the planet except the US. And I don't know why. I've bought it in Mexico. I've bought it in Norway. I've bought it in Amsterdam. I've bought it in Dubai, and certainly in Canada, but not here. You can just find it on eBay. Someone will buy it and import it and then sell it to you. Uh, if you're at the FDA and you're listening to this, guys, this is better than smoking.
Now, there's a patch. Patches come in 7, 14, or 21 milligrams. And they say in big letters, "Do not cut this patch." The reason they don't want you to cut the patch is that it's bad for their profits. If you want 7 milligrams, buy a 21 milligram patch and cut it into three pieces because 3 * 7 is 21. You just open it up, take a pair of scissors, and you stick it on your arm. And this gives you slow, steady release. They say for 24 hours, probably closer to 16. It could disturb your sleep. It could give you better dreams. And some people just stick it on in the morning and take it off in the middle of the afternoon, and you just feel great. This is the least likely to be addictive with some metabolic benefits.
Now, if you were to smoke your nicotine, which is going to be vaping, if we're not talking about smoking tobacco here, which we're not, that's the highest dependence, the highest toxicants, the highest reduction of organ size, increases in cancer, and all the bad stuff. So, just never vape. It's not worth it. There's another form that I would do long before I would vape that you don't see in the US, but you'll see it in Europe, and it's called heated tobacco. And it turns out if you have a little bit of tobacco and you heat it electrically to a certain temperature, you get nicotine and you get a little taste, but you don't get all the bad stuff from burning, and it uses less tobacco. Um, if you wanted to do that, it's typically something you'd find in Europe. And it technically is tobacco. I don't know that I have enough information to tell you that it's better than these other ways. I know it's better than smoking.
Here's some basic technique notes from 10+ years of using nicotine for longevity and cognitive function. Do not swallow the gum and lozenge. Don't swallow the spit. And it wastes your dose and it just causes nausea. And if you have an acidic drink when you're dosing it, it doesn't work as well. You can take half a piece of gum. You just bite it once and park half the gum here. That'll give you like 0.5 to 1 milligram. Remember, a cigarette is like like 12 to 20 milligrams. So, you're talking about a small dose. And there's nothing wrong with cutting patches unless it's a reservoir patch. And most of them are just a matrix. You don't have to worry about it. So, you can cut most of them. And that's the trick. So, there you go.
Now you have your intro. And in part two, I'm going to go deeper on personalization, genetics, longevity, use, metabolism testing, timing, and if you're saying, "I got to know right now," keep it under 5 milligrams a day every day, and your risks are lower. But I'll give you all the reasons, all the methods, all the other stuff you need to know in part two. See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.