When people quit smoking, their brains actually get more 'starved' for food rewards than the brains of people who are already obese.
medRxiv · March 17, 2026 · 10.64898/2026.03.13.26348339
The Takeaway
Brain scans revealed that ex-smokers show significantly higher reward-center activity when looking at high-energy food than even actively dieting obese individuals. This suggests the brain treats food as a hyper-intense substitute for nicotine, explaining why weight gain is so common and the urge to eat is so overwhelming after quitting.
From the abstract
Introduction: Neural cue reactivity is increasingly being investigated as a biomarker of treatment response and relapse prediction in addiction disorders. Whilst aberrant brain responses to salient cues (e.g. drugs) have been widely reported in addiction, it is unclear whether these brain responses persist during longer-term abstinence, how they compare between substance use disorder and obesity, and relate to potential differences in eating behaviours. As part of the Gut Hormones in ADDiction (