Nicotine cravings associated with hunger cravings?

In a previous post, Food addicts shouldn't take a day off from healing, I discussed how the suppression of my hunger pains also seemed to reduce my desire for compulsive activities in general. Well, after seeing from the LA Times "Study links brain region to smoking addiction" I looked up the "Insular Cortex" in Wiki.

Here is a bit from the article:

"The insula has increasingly become the focus of attention for its role in body representation and subjective emotional experience. In particular, Antonio Damasio has proposed that this region plays a role in mapping visceral states that are associated with emotional experience, giving rise to conscious feelings. This is in essence a neurobiological formulation of the ideas of William James, who first proposed that subjective emotional experience (i.e. feelings) arise from our brain's interpretation of bodily states that are elicited by emotional events. This is an example of embodied cognition. Functionally speaking, the insula is believed to process convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experience. More specifically, the anterior insula is related more to olfactory, gustatory, vicero-autonomic, and limbic function, while the posterior insula is related more to auditory-somesthetic-skeletomotor function. Functional imaging experiments have revealed that the insula has an important role in pain experience and the experience of a number of basic emotions, including anger, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness. Functional imaging studies have also implicated the insula in conscious desires, such as food craving and drug craving. What is common to all of these emotional states is that they each change the body in some way and are associated with highly salient subjective qualities. The insula is well situated for the integration of information relating to bodily states into higher-order cognitive and emotional processes. The insula receives information from "homeostatic afferent" sensory pathways via the thalamus and sends output to a number of other limbic-related structures, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex."

Surprise! The insula regulates subjective emotions, hunger, and various other body states. Due to the fact that I'm so profoundly affected by proper diet, reason leads me to believe that the low carb lifestyle I've chosen was truly meant for my metabolism. I wasn't imagining things!

Notice I'm not saying, "Low Carb Cures Addiction" even though it's the case with me. I've heard plenty of people tell me about how they have done the same thing through simply exercising. What I will stick to is that what we do to our bodies our bodies do to us; if we excercise and eat well we will be rewarded.

I'll be investigating this further, so stay tuned - I'll scrape up some research concerning specific diets and their effect on mental states.