What is 'nicotine'?

What is 'nicotine'?

Linda Hyder Ferry (Associate Professor, Preventive Medicine and Family Medicine, Loma Linda University School of Medicine) gives expert video advice on: Why is it so hard to quit smoking?; What is 'nicotine'?; How does nicotine affect the body? and more...

Nicotine is a water soluble chemical, grown in the leaves of tobacco plants and several other plants of the same family. It is actually designed to be an insecticide, so that when some insect comes to eat the plant, they get poisoned. Now tobacco plants are genetically engineered, and farmed and grown, to have a very high content of nicotine. When nicotine in a tobacco leaf is smoked and inhaled into the lungs, five to ten seconds later it gets through the lungs into the blood, and up the arteries of the neck into the brain.