Nicotine has been stigmatized, demonized, and all but erased from polite conversation — unless it’s part of a cautionary tale about smoking. But here’s the twist, nicotine isn’t a lab-made chemical born in a cigarette factory. It is a naturally occurring compound found in everyday foods like tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and even tea. That’s right — the same molecule we have spent decades vilifying exists in your everyday pantry.
Take eggplant, for instance. A single serving can contain up to 0.2 mg of nicotine. Green tomatoes? They pack nearly ten times more nicotine than their red counterparts. Potatoes, cauliflower, and even bell peppers join the club. Of course, the amounts are tiny — but the presence of nicotine in these foods challenges the idea that it’s something unnatural or foreign.
The problem is not the nicotine itself — it is how we have consumed it for over a century. Burning tobacco and inhaling smoke is what made nicotine delivery deadly. Combustion creates thousands of harmful chemicals and carcinogens — that’s where the disease comes from. But nicotine? On its own, it is a stimulant, much like caffeine.
Today, we have better, harm-reducing ways to consume nicotine — pouches, lozenges, gums, and heat-not-burn products, all designed to deliver the compound without smoke. Yet despite the science, the stigma hasn’t caught up with the innovation. These products are often viewed through the same lens as cigarettes, when in reality, they are a completely different category that is designed not to kill, but to help people switch.
It is time we stop treating nicotine like the villain and start looking at the real enemy: how it is delivered. Because if nature hasn’t banned nicotine from our diets, maybe society needs to stop banning rational thought around it too.
