Dr Ardis on nicotine: his ideas and the research behind them

Who Dr Bryan Ardis is

Dr Ardis became widely known through the film Watch the Water, and he has since built a large audience through his own show and his appearances on other programmes. Nicotine has become one of his signature subjects. In April 2024 his show released an episode titled "The Other N Word", which its page describes as a three-hour presentation on nicotine, and his talks carry titles such as "They Lied to You About Nicotine. Here's the NIH Proof" and "The Nicotine Psyop That Made Big Pharma TRILLIONS".

As those titles suggest, his overall argument is that the public has been misled about nicotine, and that the substance has been blamed for harms that belong to the rest of the cigarette. The three ideas below are the specific forms that argument takes when he talks about COVID-19.

Idea 1: nicotine and COVID-19

The first idea is that nicotine acts on the receptors the virus depends on. In a December 2024 episode streamed by Man in America, where he appears as the featured guest, the presentation puts it plainly: "Nicotine is perfect." The same presentation names ivermectin as a compound that is "almost the same shape as nicotine" and says it would bind to the same nicotine receptors.

The research he draws on is a 2020 hypothesis paper by Jean-Pierre Changeux of the Institut Pasteur and colleagues, published in Comptes Rendus Biologies as "A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications". The authors propose that the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor plays a critical role in COVID-19, and that nicotinic agents could be studied as a possible approach. The paper also links ivermectin to the same receptor, describing it as a positive allosteric modulator of the alpha-7 receptor, so the ivermectin connection he makes has a basis in the same paper.

The paper's starting point was smoking data. In an observational study in Frontiers in Medicine, Miyara and colleagues measured daily smoking among 340 inpatients and 139 outpatients with COVID-19 at a Paris hospital. Compared with the French general population, daily smokers were about a quarter of the number expected, with a standardised incidence ratio of 0.24 in both groups, and the authors write that their data "may suggest that the effect of tobacco smoking on COVID-19 could be mediated by nicotine rather than whole tobacco smoke." That sentence, from the authors themselves, is the bridge from the smoking pattern to the nicotine idea.

In people already seriously ill, the idea has been tested once at scale. The randomised trial NICOVID-REA, published in 2022, gave a 14 mg daily patch or a placebo to 218 adults on mechanical ventilation in French intensive care units, and the same share of patients, 28%, had died by day 28 in both groups.

Idea 2: the spike protein and snake venom

The second idea is the one he is best known for. The Man in America episode introduces his research as showing that the spike proteins of the virus are almost identical to snake venoms, binding to certain receptors in our cells. In his presentation he names the receptor: "this nicotine receptor called alpha seven nicotine receptors that most of the venoms of COVID-19 target", adding that snake venoms, most of them, target the same alpha-7 receptors.

This idea also has a published starting point. The 2020 Changeux paper points to a short sequence in the spike protein that resembles known blockers of nicotinic receptors, including alpha-bungarotoxin, a toxin from snake venom. In 2021, Lagoumintzis and colleagues described a toxin-like sequence in the receptor-binding region of the spike protein in Food and Chemical Toxicology. If the spike protein occupies the receptor the way a venom does, his reasoning goes, then nicotine, which binds that receptor, is the natural counter.

The binding step was tested directly in the laboratory in 2022, by Godellas, Cymes and Grosman in PNAS, who concluded that the binding is unlikely to be a relevant aspect of the disease. The idea has since moved into long COVID research, where a 2025 paper proposes that spike protein stays attached to these receptors after the infection. Our guide to nicotine and the spike protein covers the whole sequence of papers.

Idea 3: nicotine in everyday food

The third idea is about diet. In the same presentation he says: "if you ate a lot of eggplants every day, tomatoes every week, potatoes every week, cauliflower, celery, all of these vegetables have nicotine. If you were eating those during COVID, you most likely didn't get COVID either, just like the tobacco users." He links this back to the receptor argument, saying the nicotine in those foods is shaped to fit the nicotine receptors on every cell in the body.

Nicotine in vegetables is real and has been measured. A 1993 report in the New England Journal of Medicine by Domino and colleagues examined the nicotine content of common vegetables, eggplant and tomatoes among them. In 1999, Siegmund and colleagues measured nicotine in fresh fruit of the nightshade family at 2 to 7 micrograms per kilogram, in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and found that the nicotine in tomatoes falls as the fruit ripens. Nightshades such as tomatoes, potatoes and eggplant belong to the same plant family as tobacco, which is why the nicotine is there at all.

Where to hear him in full

The Dr. Ardis Show website hosts his episodes, and that is the place to hear his current views in his own words. Beyond the April 2024 nicotine presentation, he discussed nicotine and long COVID in a 2023 interview with Dr Ben Edwards titled "Nicotine and Long-Covid". The Man in America episode quoted above was streamed on 17 December 2024 and has a full transcript on its page.

We have also gathered a selection of his talks on nicotine in our Dr Ardis video section, and the other guides in this series cover the long COVID research, the spike protein papers and the protocol that circulates in his name. Dr Ardis has no connection to our store and does not endorse our patches.