Is nicotine itself bad for you?

A lot of evidence shows that coffee drinking causes very little health risk. Studying nicotine is a bit harder, because most nicotine users smoke, and the smoking is quite bad for you. But there is some good evidence: If nicotine were very bad for you then smokeless tobacco, which provides nicotine, would be very bad for you. read more

There are opposing schools of thought but the science is moving more toward the direction that nicotine itself is not bad for you. read more

Smoking is conflated with nicotine in the popular imagination, one of the reasons being that it was only recently known to medical science that the diet contains nicotine. Perhaps this occurred because a simple explanation for the harms of smoking was needed, at a time when no one knew that the harm is caused by the smoke, not ingredients in a tobacco plant that are also found in the normal diet. read more