this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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I have to draw this line because it's actually really important.
Smoking is when someone inhales smoke.
Vaping is when someone inhales vapour.
These are different in more ways than they are similar, but perhaps the most important is the difference in negative health outcomes. Smoking is about twenty times more harmful than vaping.
Vaping is a very effective path away from smoking for those with a nicotine dependency, and it's counterproductive to attach the same stigma to both, let alone to consider them equivalent.
It is premature to declare vaping safer than smoking, as there is relatively little comprehensive research on the long term effect of vaping. The whole "vaping is safer" spiel is not that different than when doctors were paid to tout the health benefits of cigarettes: propaganda not based in conclusive science.
On top of that, while I don't doubt that vaping is probably a good way to help someone quit smoking, there are plenty of young people who started or are staying vaping who never smoked and wouldn't have considered it
This is the issue. Vaping is great for ex smokers, but it should absolutely not be taken up for its own sake. Twenty years or so ago, we made a lot of progress, smoking looked like it was going to be phased out in mist countries. Now vaping itself is becoming an issue, hooking kids for life on nicotine.
Along with disposable vapes, marketing and selling to kids should be banned and strictly enforced.
But removing the lifeline from ex smokers will just push them back towards tobacco, because nicotine dependency is real.
Ignorant take. When vape products contain, at most, 6 ingredients, all of which have been individually extensively studied, none of which are carcinogenic, and 5 of them are FDA approved for food and pharmaceuticals, theres a pretty obvious harm reduction to inhaling thousands of compounds with at least 70 being carcinogens. So much so that every study you can find will conclude the same.
Here's a quote from a source I would call a qualified institution on the matter: "In its 2016 assessment, the Royal College of Physicians of London stated: “Although it is not possible to precisely quantify the long-term health risks associated with e-cigarettes, the available data suggest that they are unlikely to exceed 5% of those associated with smoked tobacco products and may well be substantially lower than this figure.”
That isn't pseudoscience. It's easily found by a quick Google search.
Conclusively, we're going to find that the tobacco industry makes far less money off of refined nicotine than it does from tobacco. There's a reason Phillip Morris bought a 30% stake in Juul, ran their advertising into the ground, and now also exclusively funds anti vaping ads rather than anti tobacco product ads.
They hooked a new generation on nicotine with Juul and are trying to ban vaping to sell their higher profit margin cigarettes.
Whether my conspiracy conjecture is found to be true or not, studies comparing vaping to smoking keep coming to the same conclusion, vaping is less harmful than smoking. If you have a study or information to the opposite I would love to read it.
The number of ingredients is irrelevant, especially since the idea that there are "at most" 6 ingredients is simply wrong: https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/10/07/vaping-unknown-chemicals/
A major area of concern for vaping is the fact that vaping generates much higher concentrations of nano-particles compared to regular cigarettes, and therefore may penetrate much further into the lung material (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312322/ and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0210147). There are also concerns about contaminants, variations in delivery devices (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312322/), and other confounding factors that require a lot more research to ascertain the long term impact.
As for whether I have a study or information contradicting the conclusion that vaping is safer than smoking, it depends on whether you selectively ignore the parts of the studies that say "more research is needed" (because apparently that's an "ignorant take"), but searching for "peer reviewed articles electronic cigarettes safer than tobacco" returns these top results (I did not cherry pick in any way, and instead took the top results sequentially):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2042098614524430: "In conclusion, toxicological studies have shown significantly lower adverse effects of EC vapor compared with cigarette smoke. Characteristically, the studies performed by using the liquids in their original liquid form have found less favorable results; however, no comparison with tobacco smoke was performed in any of these studies, and they cannot be considered relevant to EC use since the samples were not tested in the form consumed by vapers. More research is needed, including studies on different cell lines such as lung epithelial cells. In addition, it is probably necessary to evaluate a huge number of liquids with different flavors since a minority of them, in an unpredictable manner, appear to raise some concerns when tested in the aerosol form produced by using an EC device." Granted, it does go on to say that existing evidence shows that vaping is safer than tobacco, but clarifies that there still needs to be more research on some of the unquantified risks of vaping.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5469426/ This is an older study using a very small sample size. It focuses on e-cigs as a tool for smoking cessation, but also concludes "Similar to cancer risk, there are no published data describing the long-term lung function or cardiovascular effects of e-cigarettes; ongoing surveillance, especially once e-cigarettes are regulated and standardized, will be necessary."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129443 This study was primarily measuring how likely e-cigs were to get people to stop using tobacco, rather than comparative safety (despite the title). The conclusion makes clear that it is not known (at the time; this was 9 years ago) if e-cigarettes could be considered "safe": "Adding e-cigarettes to tobacco smoking did not facilitate smoking cessation or reduction. If e-cigarette safety will be confirmed, however, the use of e-cigarettes alone may facilitate quitters remaining so."
I'm not sure what your Google search was, but its probably best not to cherry pick a single source to support your claim.
You're clearly not cherry picking. If you were, you might have some articles that at least hint that ECs might be more harmful than cigarettes, but none of them come close. The first link you posted gets the closest, but it's also just an article about one experiment, using 4 liquids that are not recommended in EC communities.
The rest of the actual studies you posted are not about safety. They do not compare disease or illness or death between the two. One of them does compare the amount of toxic chemicals in ECs to cigarettes and finds ECs to have zero. Until there are long term studies comparing the rate of death and disease, no journal is going to publish any definitive answer that ECs are safer than cigarettes. Until then, we will just have a bunch of studies comparing chemical composition, rates and particle sizes. And if it isn't obvious, chemical composition and their rates are a bit more worrisome than the latter.
If you read through these studies and still think vaping is more harmful than cigarettes, then by all means wait the 50 years it will take the scientific community to out right say the obvious "vaping isn't healthy, but it is significantly less harmful than traditional tobacco smoking."
My argument wasn't "vaping isn't healthy" or "vaping is more harmful than cigarettes". It was "more research is needed", which each of those studies I linked support. Thank you, though, for proving my point in your attempt to build a lovely strawman to argue against.
And my argument is that of course more research is needed, but it's to prove what we already know. Inhaling properly manufactured vape juices is less harmful than smoking cigarettes by a large degree.
If you see a house billowing with smoke you don't have to wait for firefighters to tell you the house is on fire.