While of course quitting smoking massively benefits health, a new study has suggested that quitters can dramatically increase their chances of developing type 2 diabetes , as they pack on the pounds comfort eating.
Scientists at John Hopkins University have discovered that those people who managed to give up cigarettes were 70% more likely to develop diabetes within six years than those who had not gone through the quitting process, partly due to the weight they gained in the months and years after they first gave up.
The team monitored 11,000 middle-aged people for 17 years and discovered that those who stopped smoking were most at risk of diabetes in the first three years after they threw away the cigerettes, as the average smoker put on an average of 4kg and saw their waistline increase by about 1.7 inches.
However there have been warnings that those who were planning on using the new year as the extra impetus they needed to quit not to be discouraged by the study. Health advisor Natasha Marsland, who works for the charity Diabetes UK, said that people definitely should not use the ‘theoretical’ results of the study as an excuse not to give up.
The study is especially interesting as it shows the extra pitfalls that smokers can face when they quit. It can be so easy not to realise that you’ve substituted food for cigarettes until the scales are screaming it at you, by which point it can be very hard to lose the extra weight.
However, perhaps if people were more aware that they were likely to eat more when they quit they could take extra precautions to ensure that their laudable efforts to get healthy do not have unexpectedly unhealthy consequences, such as chewing gum rather than eating biscuits or substituting fruit for fatty comfort snacks.