tonight's find

I was browsing my evening news, and the following piece caught my eyes:

Aliens Don't Like to Eat People That Smoke! (obviously, here they mean the ILlegal aliens, the little green (or grey) men that fly saucers and mess with us at night, or so some otherwise sane people believe).

Jokes aside, everybody knows about health risks associated with smocking (lung cancer being one of them). It gets overlooked, however, that the carcinogenic effect in that cigarette comes from all the junk, tar, and other garbage that accumulates in thtough modern processing. The addictive substance itself, nicotine, is non-carcinogenic amd has interesting properties in the brain:

" Nicotine mimics one of the body's most significant neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. This is the neurotransmitter most often associated with cognition in the cerebral cortex. Acetylcholine is the primary carrier of thought and memory in the brain. It is essential to have appropriate levels of acetylcholine to have new memories or recall old memories.

[..]

Acetyl-L-Carnitine (ALC) is the acetyl ester of carnitine, the carrier of fatty acids across Mitochondrial membranes. Like carnitine, ALC is naturally produced in the body and found in small amounts in some foods. ...Research in recent years has hoisted ALC from its somewhat mundane role in energy production to nutritional cognitive enhancer and neuroprotective agent extraordinaire. Indeed, taken in its entirety, ALC has become one of the premiere “anti-aging” compounds under scientific investigation, especially in relation to brain and nervous system deterioration.

ALC is found in various concentrations in the brain, and its levels are significantly reduced with aging.(1) In numerous studies in animal models, ALC administration has been shown to have the remarkable ability of improving not only cognitive changes, but also morphological (structural) and neurochemical changes. ...ALC has varied effects on cholinergic activity, including promoting the release(2) and synthesis(3) of acetylcholine. Additionally, ALC promotes high affinity uptake of choline, which declines significantly with age.(4) While these cholinergic effects were first described almost a quarter of a century ago,(5) it now appears that this is only the tip of the ALC iceberg. [Gissen, VRP's Nutritional News, March, 1995]

[..]

...We have shown that numbers and function of diverse nAChR subtypes can be influenced by many biologically active substances, ranging from steroids to local anesthetics, and by agents acting on the extracellular matrix, the cytoskeleton, on second messenger signaling, and at the nucleus. We also have shown that chronic nicotine exposure induces numerical upregulation of many diverse nAChR subtypes via a post-transcriptional process that is dominated by effects on intracellular pools of receptors or their precursors."

the above simply means that you'll have more ACL receptors if you smoke. Which is why probably that there may be possible BENEFITS of nicotine for certain brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease (that's associated with low levels of ACL), see here .

I personally don't smoke, never tried to, and never had any desire to try. But, in an unlikely event that I were to take it up, I would probably roll my own out of organic tobacco. That is, if there still were a freedom to do so, which is really unlikely, judging from the recent moves towards anti-smoking laws.