When Smoking Tastes Good, It's Harder to Quit

"Bitter tasters" are less likely to smoke
Not everyone is susceptible to the sweet lure of cigarettes’ taste. So-called bitter tasters are less likely to cite taste as a motivating factor for smoking—and less likely to smoke in the first place.

This category of smoker was investigated in a 2001 study published in Addictive Behaviors; researchers at the National Institutes of Health compared subjects’ genetic ability to recognize bitter flavors with their likelihood of smoking and their motivations for lighting up.

The study found that at the other end of the spectrum from bitter tasters were smokers with very little bitter sensitivity ("nontasters"), who were at higher risk for heavy smoking and therefore more likely to become addicted to nicotine.

Some food makes smoking taste better
If you’re not genetically programmed to find smoking hard to quit, maybe it’s the food you eat that makes cigarettes so enticing.

A 2007 study—led by McClernon and published by Duke University Medical Center in Nicotine & Tobacco Research—found that certain foods enhance smoking, while other foods get in the way of one's enjoyment of a cigarette. Red meat, coffee, and alcohol seem to make cigarettes taste better, while fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and noncaffeinated beverages such as water and juice were most often cited as interfering with the taste.

This may explain the coffee-cigarette connection as well. "The conventional wisdom has been that there’s something about the combination of nicotine and caffeine that smokers like," McClernon says, referring to theories that the two substances may complement each other chemically. "But it may simply be that they taste better together—like Oreos and cold milk."

The research is preliminary, but it does suggest a decent strategy for quitting smoking. Grabbing a celery or carrot stick might indeed do more than just distract you from your cigarette craving.