Do Nicotine Pouches Affect Your Metabolism?

Key points:

• The metabolism turns food into energy, which is used for various purposes.
• Some metabolisms work faster than others, and the same person can have a metabolism that works faster at some moments than others.
• Nicotine speeds up the metabolism, possibly due to the impact it has on breathing and heart rate.
• It’s unclear how the impact of nicotine pouches compares to other nicotine products like cigarettes or vapes.

How the Metabolism Works

Metabolism is widely known as being that thing that helps us to lose weight (or stops us from losing weight). But in more technical terms, it’s all about chemical processes and energy. The metabolism turns food and drink into energy and stores energy, which it uses for digesting food, making the heart beat, breathing, repairing cells, maintaining the right temperature, and more.

Basically, thanks to metabolism, we can keep doing all the things that make life great — and the faster the metabolism is, the more efficient it is at turning calories into energy.

Everybody has a metabolism, but not everyone’s metabolism functions the same. Even for one person, their metabolism will function differently at different points in their lifetime and their day.

Some factors that affect metabolism include:

• Age: The metabolism naturally slows as we age.
• Body size: The bigger a body is, the faster its metabolism is.
• Muscles: People with greater mass have a faster metabolism since the muscle tissue burns more calories than fat.
• Hormones: Since hormones play a role in the metabolism, they affect how fast it works.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, as everything from sleep to pregnancy to living in a very hot or cold environment can affect our metabolism.

How Nicotine Affects the Metabolism

Although nicotine won’t make anyone more muscular or change their age, there are mechanisms through which it affects the metabolism.

Nicotine is a chemical compound, and after using a product like nicotine pouches, it enters the bloodstream and heads to the adrenal glands. There, it produces adrenaline, raising the heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. Somewhere along the line, there’s also a release of dopamine, which contributes to the feel-good “nicotine rush.”

There’s evidence that nicotine speeds up the metabolism. It’s less clear why exactly this happens, but the leading theory is that nicotine makes us breathe more often and makes the heart beat faster, which all requires more energy. Remember how we said that the metabolism controls breathing and heart rate?

Some estimates suggest nicotine boosts the calories the body uses by 7-15%.

Nicotine Pouches and Weight Loss

While nicotine (and therefore nicotine pouches) can theoretically make the metabolism work faster, they shouldn’t be used as a weight loss tool.

The best way to lose weight is by managing how many calories are consumed and how many are burned. Since people with more muscle mass have a faster metabolism, increasing muscle can also make it easier to lose weight.

For those who struggle with this process, help is out there. Whether it’s working with a nutritionist or personal trainer for a diet plan or getting medical help from a health professional (such as semaglutide injections).

Many people find that using nicotine affects their appetite and makes them less hungry. While it’s likely that the metabolism is the heavy hitter here, nicotine may also impact the hunger signals in the brain (ghrelin and leptin), which reduces hunger. Often, people gain weight after quitting nicotine.

Impact of Nicotine Pouches vs Cigarettes on the Metabolism

Most existing research on how nicotine affects the metabolism has been done on cigarettes. Since nicotine pouches are a newer product, information on how they impact the metabolism is limited. But ultimately, they both use the same chemical compound, so a similar impact can be expected.

One relevant factor is that nicotine absorption varies depending on the product used. In the case of nicotine pouches, users adopt 25-30% of the nicotine, compared to about 10% of the nicotine in cigarettes.

The more nicotine is absorbed, the more impact it’s likely to have on the metabolism. So, a heavy nicotine pouch user is likely to end up absorbing more nicotine than a heavy cigarette user — especially if they opt for strong nicotine pouches. But in some cases, cigarette users may end up absorbing more nicotine, depending on how many cigarettes they use.