Vietnamese women pose the same puzzle, with even higher lung cancer rates and lower smoking rates.
The county has also made it a priority to lower smoking rates through empowerment and awareness programs, Dr. Lipsman said.
"The cheaper the oil, the better the roux," he said, explaining that butter has a lower smoking point.
Lower smoking rates, of course, bring large benefits for society, by reducing early death and making people healthier.
Yet lower smoking intensity gives rise to African Americans having fewer average "pack-years" — calculated by multiplying the number of packs smoked per day by years of smoking — which is a criterion used to determine eligibility for lung cancer screening.
Taxing cigarettes, banning smoking in bars and not glamorizing it in movies is far more likely to lower smoking rates than drugs tailored to certain genotypes, these critics say.
And since olive oil has a much lower smoking point than, say, groundnut oil, almost any cooking activity beyond the gentlest of sweating will bring about this bad-fat transformation.
But he now believes differently, a spokeswoman said, because the city's youth smoking rate has plateaued and recent research has suggested a correlation between a higher smoking age and lower smoking rates.
"Having this new generation coming up with much lower smoking rates than you've ever seen historically is what's really pulling down the rate, and of course that promises great things for the future," he said.
Over all, they found that "each 10percentt increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2percentt increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal". Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn't believe that the relationship between lower smoking and higher obesity rates was so direct.
Combined, their shares are down 29% year-to-date, and have struggled for years amid lower smoking rates.
