Read the article, nicotine vapor from e-cigarettes have the potential to cause the same damage to DNA as nicotine from traditional cigarettes depending on the amount of nicotine present and duration of contact.
The claim in the title is utterly false because nicotine isn't the only health risk issue with tobacco cigarettes. Essentially the results show that vaporized chemical nicotine can cause the same amount of damage regardless of how the chemical was vaporized. In summary they proved the obvious.
Edit: The term 'potential' in the research has a very clear and rigorous meaning, the term 'potential' in the title is clickbait bullshit.
> UConn researchers found that e-cigarettes loaded with a nicotine-based liquid are potentially as harmful as unfiltered cigarettes when it comes to causing DNA damage
I don't like the way they've titled their research. Given that there are numerous chemical additives in traditional chemical cigarettes that are known to cause health issues nicotine may not be the dominantly harmful component in cigarettes.
Discouraging cigarette smokers from moving to e-cigarettes is akin to abstinence only programs, it's not a pragmatic approach to the realities of the problem and human behavior. Of course the tobacco industry also has a vested interest in cigarettes so it's favorable to them for media to be as negative as possible about eCigarettes.
If eCigarette second hand smoke is less harmful than cigarettes and they aren't banned in the places that regular cigarettes are it would create a strong downward pressure on traditional cigarette smoking...
..and it looks like the Altria group does recruit from UConn, if that actually means anything.
Even if e-cigs are equally harmful on a per-quantity basis (which I'm still somewhat skeptical of), an advantage over regular cigarettes is that you can consume less than one full cigarette at a time.
100% anecdotal but the few people I know that use e-cigs are using them all day long. I'm just glad a lot of places treat it the same as smoking and ban it. Nothing worse than being in line with someone that thinks its cool to vape and blow huge clouds.
I smoke slightly more with ecigs than I did with cigarettes and I use the vape throughout the day. But whenever I have a real cigarette now I get a head rush and feel the nicotine quite strong, which is the feeling I would previously get with the first cigarette after the numerous times I quit smoking and started again. Clearly I'm using far less nicotine with e-cigarettes, which surprised me because I didn't notice any side effects (additional "niccing") when I switched to vaping last yr.
So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.
I don't think the debate is that nicotine is harmful in such quantities, but it's a terribly addictive stimulant generally consumed with varyingly harmful chemicals, so easing it out to zero helps in quitting inhaling those chemicals altogether.
Apart from the obvious bad manners implied by blowing huge clouds of smoke in a space where people are tightly packed, as in a queue; what problem do you have with e-smoke exactly? The smell?
This is literally stuff that's been inside a person's body being ejected out into my face. Now, I kinda agree that everyone is doing this constantly by simply breathing, but I don't really smell other people's exhaled CO2 so I'm ok with it. If it has odor and is visible, I WILL find it VERY rude and disturbing, to say the least.
I also find people's breath smelly on public transport.
The reason is not just cigarettes but bad oral hygiene in general.
Not sure what to do about it though...
On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.
Also...
Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while
vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.
I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it,
so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.
I also don't know what's in the smoke. It might be harmless, might be absolutely awful for you. Doesn't help that my friends have used the excuse "it's just vapor".
With a smell allergy, I've had e-cigs (and perfumes, which I lump in the same category) near me induce everything from coughing and sneezing fits to migraines and vomiting.
I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.
Whoa, I'm not alone! I can't handle most perfumes or scents (in addition to a number of things). Nowhere near as bad as your friend, but I can get to the point where breathing gets hard.
Anecdotally: my mother frequently smokes regular cigarettes, she'll light one for a few 'puffs' then put it out.
To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.
If you smoke anything in parts, it's well worth it to learn to purge. It's a cigar trick, you basically slowly blow through the cigar for a few seconds and it improves the taste and slows the burn for a while.
It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?
I smoked cigarettes in the past and used ecigs to make cessation easier. When I switched, I used the vape more than cigarettes, but I also had a lot easier of a time quitting the vape(due to the lack of MAOI I believe). Even if people vape more than smoke, it may be worth it if they use it to successfully quit smoking altogether.
I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.
I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.
My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.
Alternate anecdote: my grandfather smoked pipe tobacco for as long and died of heart failure complications due to lifelong nicotine usage, after already dealing with lung cancer-related illness.
Discouraging smokers from moving to e-cigs is a bad idea, but discouraging non-smokers is a great idea. It's a tough tradeoff, and I don't think the analogy to sex ed is really a good one. Virtually everyone has sex, so teaching abstinence is foolish. But most people don't smoke, so saying "don't smoke, not even e-cigs" is a good thing for that segment of the population.
Ideally, you'd get all the addicts to move to e-cigs, and everybody else to not use either one. Not that I have any brilliant ideas how to accomplish that.
> discouraging non-smokers is a great idea
Thank you, I hadn't thought about that before and you're completely right.
If the risk profile for cigarettes is just barely too high for a non-smoker then e-cigarettes may be the last 'push' Although this does require some assumptions about why individuals start smoking cigarettes in the first place.
It's sort of like the classic market segmentation problem. Ideally you want to charge each customer the maximum price they're willing to pay, but it's hard to give different prices to different people. Likewise, you want to push each person towards the least harmful version of smoking or non-smoking they'll accept, but you can't tailor general advice like that.
In any case, it seems like much of the e-cig debate comes down to this. Those in favor see it as an alternative to cigarettes for smokers. Those against see it as a way to get non-smokers to consume tobacco.
Just this weekend, I saw a friend of mine vape who'd never touched a cigarette. His arguments were "Relax, it ain't a cigarette." and "I only vape for the taste of the liquid."
I expressed skepticism that burning random chemicals and inhaling the resulting smoke is healthy. Good to have some evidence to back that up.
Yes, if e-cigs are harmless then I don't care. I don't think that's very likely. Nicotine is not good for you. It doesn't look like there's any question as to whether or not e-cigs cause harm, only a question of how much harm.
"Nicotine is not good for you" is slightly misleading - smoking tobacco is really bad for you, and the reasons for that have nothing to do with nicotine; smoking nicotine free tobacco would be pretty much as bad health-wise.
To the first order of approximation, nicotine addiction is bad for your health because it causes you to burn and inhale plant matter, the common delivery methods of nicotine are horribly unhealthy but if you're talking about nicotine as such (for example, through a transdermal patch) then it doesn't really have significant adverse health effects.
What about chewing tobacco? All smokeless tobacco has risks of cancer. I would not say that nicotine is harmless without a large amount of proof, and it should take about as much proof to say that it is not a carcinogen.
There's actually been a lot of research on nicotine, and the conclusion is that it's _slightly_ carcinogenic.
But more to the point, there was little reason to believe it would cause cancer in the first place, compared to any other random compound. Its association with tobacco is a wash, because other compounds, like aldehydes, are completely sufficient to explain the carcinogenicity of smoking tobacco.
That would be a paradox resolution. I suggest to likewise think of the short term effect as harm, so the long term effect is the accumulated harm.
Just like a light hit on the head would increase awareness, but increasing the force and repetition of the hits on the head is not well advised, when the effect wears off after overuse - to say nothing about the immediate effect of getting hit.
The perceived short term benefits are only secondary effects. And with regards to nicotine, all the arguments in favor are to be treated as extraordinary claims.
Tobacco is full of really carcinogenic stuff other than nicotine.
For analysis of nicotine as such, you can refer to the known side-effects of nicotine dermal patches; they're well researched, approved by FDA, etc - the place of application can get skin irritation and itchiness; overdose of nicotine can get dizziness, headache, rapid heartbeat, and nausea (same as for too much nicotine through other means), but they're not known to cause cancer or other significant damage despite being used by very many people over very long time.
For completeness, one of the issues with e-cigs is that it heats a hydrocarbon by passing it over a poorly-regulated heating element. That's a recipe for creating random organic molecules, many of which are most definitely harmful. Probably not as harmful as old-school smoking, but definitely a case of "do not use around others and do not use except as a substitute for smoking."
can you explain how that's different from toasting bread or roasting vegetables to someone who has a weak understanding of chemistry and what makes molecules harmful?
As someone with a smell allergy, my first approximation to a guess (I am not a chemist), please correct me if I'm mistaken, is something to do with the alcohols contained in most e-cig recipes and borrowed from the perfume industry. Alcohols when aerosolized tend to travel farther than most other smell carriers (that's why perfumes use alcohol) and more directly enter the bloodstream, skipping the body's filters (which makes it particularly useful to e-cigs as a carrier).
I'd suppose other chemicals in traditional cigarettes fill very similar roles.
E-cigs involve direct contact with the heating element at a much higher temperature than food would normally be exposed to. A quick google shows that the element can be as hot as 500F, and the fluid will be in direct contact. Also, the organics used in e-cig fluid are smaller and more easily ripped apart by heat.
Imagine you want your house to smell like coffee. So you heat a baking tray until it is white hot. Then drip coffee onto the tray (don't actually try this). Much of the coffee will be vaporized with the water in it providing a nice aroma. But some of it will be in direct contact with the tray and will burn and have a nasty smell. The hotter the tray is, the more the coffee gets burned and transformed into not-coffee. E-cigs are like that, except one doesn't notice the nasty aroma of the accidental chemicals.
To be fair, while I don't support it, abstinence only sex ed is usually in the context of high school, where it's probably not true that "virtually everyone has sex."
The abstinence part is (almost?) always in the context of "until marriage" which can extend well beyond high school and remains highly mismatched with people's behavior.
It should also be noted that abstinence only sex ed usually involves many outright lies, such as that sex outside of marriage is objectively immoral, that waiting until marriage prevents STIs, vastly exaggerated figures for the risk of disease and failure rates of birth control, etc. Whereas smoking is actually dangerous, and "don't smoke, it'll greatly increase your chances of getting these various horrible diseases" is actually truthful.
The "until marriage" part is usually part of the moral beliefs of the people who push for abstinence only sex ed in public schools, but I wasn't aware that public schools generally taught that part.
I can't speak for others, but I was never taught the "until marriage" clause, and I graduated high school in 2011. We were taught that abstinence was the only way to completely remove the risk of pregnancy or STD/STI, which really doesn't change once you're married or whatever.
Are they teaching abstinence "until you're out of high school"? Otherwise it's either "until marriage" or "until death." I think most kids understand that marriage usually involves sex, even with bad sex ed.
I think they're just teaching "until ..."—as in, they don't have an "until", it's just "don't have sex." As if sex was exactly equivalent to a drug, where if you avoid the particular subculture that "does" the drug, you'll just never need to think about it.
Though I think the true implication is "don't have sex until an impulse comes along to do so, that is strong enough to completely drown out the voice of your superego in your head. And then—if the impulse really is that strong—the 'proper' order to do things is to get married to that person, and then have sex with them."
Is that totally truthful though? How much do you have to smoke for it to really be dangerous? If I keep a pack around for 1-2 months, and have a few cigarettes a week, how much am I really increasing my chances? I don't smoke 1-2 packs a day like some smokers do, I certainly don't have the same odds do I? Can it be possible that the truth is that you can smoke in moderation without any significant increase in risk? I would certainly like to know the real picture.
All I ever see is picture of black lungs, messages of certain cancer and death. To me, this is like those people who have pictures of dead fetuses for their anti-abortion message. It's extreme, and sets of red-flags in my brain.
I fucking love smoking. It gives me a way to chill out and unwind for 10-15 minutes. It's great for my mental health, because I won't do it in my house... I have to get away from the computer, I have to stop what I'm doing. It gets me away from everything.
Searching around, it looks like even light smoking is still bad. Not as bad, but still bad.
"Light and intermittent smoking carry nearly the same risk for cardiovascular disease as daily smoking.... In addition, the risk of ischemic heart disease in light-smoking men and women aged 35 to 39 years who smoke 1 to 4 cigarettes per day is nearly 3 times that of a nonsmoker."
Just for reference. 1-4 per day would be about a pack every 8 days, averaged. I'd be curious how that compares to a non-daily smoker who as the grandparent suggests, only smokes about once every other day on average.
I expect it's still a significant health risk, but I've never seen studies on people who don't smoke daily.
Those rare smokers practically don't exist; either they are wise and just stop because they were just testing, or they increase their habit, because they are still testing, until they forget why they even started and need the narcotics to numb the pain they caused themselves.
How the damage happens is not important, but consider the possibility of slowly accumulating effects because of a slow rehabilitation potential.
> I fucking love smoking. It gives me a way to chill out and unwind for 10-15 minutes.
Me too. I haven't had a cigarette in over a decade, but I remain hopeful that modern science will find a cure for cancer and other smoking-related diseases during my lifetime, so I can resume smoking again. This probably sounds nuts to non-smokers and I won't bother explaining it any further.
As an aside, I am one of many who tried e-cigarettes when they came out because they were very convenient, and ended up quitting. They were new and not banned anywhere yet, so I could 'smoke' even more. I never liked smoking indoors and do not like the stale tobacco smell so they were great. For reasons I don't really understand my tobacco habit gradually tapered off and I no longer smoke anything, but I do miss it.
>All I ever see is picture of black lungs, messages of certain cancer and death.
First of all, I envy you. You're a "chipper" and make up about 5% of the population of smokers. I on the other hand am in the Majority. It's either zero or a pack a day. The black lung photos didn't contribute to my cessation. Instead I had to grow up and decide I didn't like feeling like garbage. That said, If the black lung applies to that 95% of us that can't stop at just one, it's probably the right message.
"Abstinence only" is terrible at any level. It's a good idea to encourage abstinence, but withholding education about birth control and STD protection is dangerous along the same lines as withholding vaccines.
Getting back to the original topic, we need to know more information about the other additives in e-cigs as well. There are kids at my child's high-school that smoke non-nicotine e-cigs supposedly because they like the taste (they come in fruity flavors).
Anecdotally, my younger friends seem to be much more ok with someone vaping than smoking cigarettes, to the point that mentioning it is harmful is brushed off. This is among people that are not habitual tobacco users; it seems the advertising must be working...
Isn't it because people naturally assume e-cig smokers are actually ordinary smokers trying to quit? Most e-cig smokers I know fall in this category so I view all vaping people through that lens.
And in that cotext such dismissive reaction makes sense to me.
In the UK e-cig sellers have signed up to a voluntary code of practice where they don't sell product (e-cig devices or juice) to people who haven't ever smoked.
That agreement isn't working very well, lots of sellers will sell to people who say "I've never smoked".
It's a shame, because that's the kind of thing that could force more regulation.
> The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) said 87% of shops were knowingly or unwittingly prepared to sell e-cigarettes to people who have never smoked or vaped.
> Given that there are numerous chemical additives in traditional chemical cigarettes that are known to cause health issues nicotine may not be the dominantly harmful component in cigarettes.
Based on your above comment, it sounds like you think that they tested for nicotine specifically. They did not. From the press release:
There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says. Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. They then loaded their device’s microwells with specific enzymes that would convert those chemicals into metabolites. If these chemicals were in the sample, the test gave them a reading for genotoxicity. If the chemicals were not present, there would be no reaction.
Based on that paragraph, and other sentences throughout the press release, my interpretation is that their findings are that e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as cigarettes. Some of the comments in this thread make it sounds like the researchers showed that just the nicotine in e-cigarettes is as potentially harmful as just the nicotine in cigarettes, but that's not my reading.
The 'potentially' is a HUGE asterisk here, though.
E-cigarette liquid, at it's base, has two chemicals: propylene glycol and nicotine.
Anything other than that is a flavor additive, or a smoke volume additive (glycerine). PG and Glycerine are extensively studied and safe for human consumption, PG is actually used in nebulizer treatments for people with asthma.
Furthermore, a proper e-cigarette doesn't cause a chemical change in the liquid- it's only a physical state change. That precludes the oxidation reactions that characterize tobacco smoking.
So my skepticism is really tweaked by this article. Yes, someone could potentially add hundreds of flavoring chemicals. Definitely room for a problem there, so address that. The essential cigarette is only two to three chemicals.
The makeup of e-cigarette vapor is different than the what's in the liquid. When vaping, the e-cigarette coil heats up to 300°C and breaks compounds in the liquid (such as propylene glycol) into new compounds such as propylene oxide, acetaldehyde, and formaldehyde. Researchers found that aerosols generated by e-cigarettes contain up to 31 compounds, some of which are known carcinogens.
Wow, didn't know that. So, when the article says that "There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes..." they are actually referring to compounds that are being generated after vaping?
I believe so, but he could also be referring to how there are hundreds of different flavors (each containing different compounds), and each compound interacts differently when heated by coils.
My understanding is that this is a bit of a false alarm, because most devices target 150C, which is just enough to vaporize the PG, but not oxidize it, not 300C where things get ugly. So, with reasonable safety measures in place, this shouldn't be an issue.
The study I citied measured compounds produced by on-the-market e-cigarettes, specifically the EGO CE4 and Kanger Aerotank Mini.
While I'm not sure what temperature these devices target, what I know is that the researchers found that longer into a usage session the coils became hotter and produced larger quantities carcinogens.
My understanding though is that while e-cigarettes do produce carcinogens, they produce less quantities than regular cigarettes do.
Reading a lot of these studies, I get the feel that the researchers aren't really users of the devices, nor have they really consulted any real users of the devices. It's akin to someone who had never seen how a car works being surprised that they are capable of going over 100 MPH. Sure, they can, but usually people don't drive them around that fast. The same goes for e-cigarettes. Sure, if you max out the voltage, keep the coil red hot and dry out the wick you're going to get some bad stuff, but no real user would inhale much of this (at least not more than once) because it would taste terrible.
A successful vaporization requires temperatures of 150-200°C with a max of 250 for self-experimenting enthusiasts.
So when these studies include the chemicals caused by pyrolysis, they're not studying realistic e-cigarette use.
A good analogy would be studying the consumption of improperly distilled alcohol that included methanol- EXCEPT you wouldn't be able to taste the methanol in bad liquor, and you'd absolutely be able to taste burnt e-liquid.
I'd still have to imagine that the acetaldehyde and formaldehyde intake is a small fraction of what the average persona already ingests in the form of alcohol.
Which of course doesn't mean it is good for us but I think establishes that the danger from that is probably less scary than that sounds
It's "potentially" because a study in the lab cannot demonstrate health outcomes. (Which, of course, requires people to be involved.) It's also wise to attach it to single studies: we don't tend to change views based on single studies, but on large amounts of studies that corroborate each other.
So, yes, I agree: this warrants much further study. I have not come to any conclusions, but I have updated my priros. But, independent of that, I felt some comments in this thread were misrepresenting what the research did.
The flavors must make some sort of difference. I have an e-cig. Not a huge user, but I notice that the resistors clog up a lot faster with the darker juices and last a lot longer with the clear ones. I am mildly concerned about the effects that they might have on health - because when I got it I had read stuff similar to your "two to three chemicals" line also saying that its essentially the same as an asthma inhaler, when the reality is somewhat different.
heart disease (not lung cancer) is the number one threat from smoking cigarettes. is that the type of dna damage that leads to heart disease? thats the question I'd like to know.
> I don't like the way they've titled their research.
The authors' title, as it appears in the journal the study was submitted to is "Automated 3-D Printed Arrays to Evaluate Genotoxic Chemistry: E-Cigarettes and Water Samples" (see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118).
The "E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’" title comes from "UConn Today", a university news site.
Just to be clear that the academics didn't choose this silly title.
Of course the cigarette companies are investing in the e-cigarette business, like Philip Morris with IQOS. Smoking is a dead end so they are looking for alternatives.
Ultimately, like smoking, using e-cigarettes is smelly and unhealthy. Regulators aren't going to allow for them to be presented as harmless because they aren't and science isn't going to ignore the harmful effects because they do exist. The only reason e-cigarettes are not banned in all the places cigarettes are is because the rules are about burning tobacco and politics makes it difficult to change the rules.
One advantage of e-cigs is that people can lower the nicotine in e-cigs over six months to a year, and eventually even quit. I guess they could theoretically do this with cigarettes, too, but nobody actually does that. Also it may help that you can still smoke for a while on 0% nicotine, just to replicate the action of smoking, but without any nicotine. But at that point you should already be able to quit completely.
If i consume 100 smokes vs 100 vapes equivalent then what will be the total damage done to the enviornment in each case,starting from the production to disposal?
The environmental advantage, if there is one, is almost certainly on the margins, and I don't know if the equivalent of 100 cigarettes would be enough to realize an advantage.
They did not report their methods for the ecig sample acquisition. It's quite possible that they were not using the vaporizer under the normal conditions. There was a previous study where they were running the device at excessive voltages over tens of seconds, causing pyrolysis which would never happen under normal usage. Simply because it would taste awful and make the user cough a lot.
I would have liked to see control experiments: analyse the e-liquid without vaporization, and analyse pure glycerol/propylene glycol. The former may show a response, but the latter should not show any at all.
It's not though. No mention of the device, eliquid, device parameters (power or temperature depending on the model), or puff duration. It's a pretty significant omission.
Exactly, as anyone who used ecigs knows, if you pull when the coil is too hot, you get what i'm assuming is formaldehyde and friends.
when used normally, the ecig should only vaporize the PG and nicotine (2 ingredients). if you burn the mixture, that's where you get a cocktail of chemicals akin to a cigarette
it's admittedly hard to describe but a really vital difference. its the difference between warming a cookie and burning a cookie. the soot from the burnt cookie is way more toxic than a properly warmed cookie
that said, i welcome more information about e-cigs for sure. but as an ex-smoker who used ecigs's step-down method and finally quit last year, we need to be very careful before crucifying this very effective cessation device
I was one of those people who was pretty well convinced that e-cigarettes and cigarettes were both about equal as far as danger due to the nicotine. E-cigarettes delivering on average throughout the day more nicotine than cigarettes. And cigarettes, delivering ash.
A few years ago I read a convincing article to the contrary from the NHS. Detailing how the most dangerous carcinogens came from combustion of tobacco.
Smoking related signalling has been a train wreck for a decade or more now, so of course after this article came out the very same NHS started talking about banning certain types of e-cigarettes. I don't know what's going on anymore. It doesn't help that there are zealots that spam information about e-cigarettes being perfectly safe, and charities that spam information about cigarettes killing you and everyone around you so donate right away.
The internet has utterly failed us on data about smoking. If anyone knows what's actually going on, then they are lost in a sea of other people that are doing their best to shout over one another.
> The XXXX has utterly failed us on data about YYYY. If anyone knows what's actually going on, then they are lost in a sea of other people that are doing their best to shout over one another.
Lol - like most of the modern world - Internet or not. :)
It seems to boil down to "mostly harmless" whereas all the delivery technologies for it, other than the patch, seem to be almost infinitely more dangerous than the nicotine itself.
"mostly harmless" perhaps but definitely not "harmless".
From the Wikipedia article:
> by the 1980s the use of nicotine insecticide had declined below 200 tons. This was due to the availability of other insecticides that are cheaper and less harmful to mammals.
> Currently, nicotine, even in the form of tobacco dust, is prohibited as a pesticide for organic farming in the United States/
Actually the thing that pisses me off about e-cigs is the clouds of flavoured vapour that I get bombarded with. I don't want to inhale second hand raspberry flavoured steam.
E-cig liquids are, much like smoke machine fluid, mostly water. Except maybe the fluids used in the competitive smoke blowing stuff. glycerin/glycol is the delivery mechanism, water is the propellant.
What an odd way to measure harm. It turns out being outside is more dangerous than smoking is!
This is also laughable considering how utterly terrible cigarette smoke is—I can't even imagine how I would make a vapor that harmful without combusting something.
This is exactly the type of study you see when someone has it out for e-cigarettes. Who is it? I smell Philip Morris cash.
It amazes me to read the comments on articles related to e-cigarettes. Everyone is quick to point out any potential flaws -- or even point out that this is still _better_ than regular cigarettes. I suspect it's like taking a time machine back 50 years and experiencing the same thing that happened with cigarettes.
The fact remains, folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals. You'd have to be crazy to suggest this is probably not dangerous. Just because it's delivered slightly differently doesn't really make it ok.
E-Cigarrete smokers are becoming like a club of fanatics. I'm a smoker, and the gusto with which people encourage me to switch to e-cigs I find disturbing.
Hah, feels like it's been that way for a while now. Definitely strange to me, and I'm going on two years of only my vape after being about a pack a day. Imagine people treated patches or nincorette like they do e-cigs.
I used to smoke, now vape, and what I like most about it is that I both get my nicotine and I can also be very physically active. Physical activity is something that I could never do when I smoked.
Edit: And I do accept that vaping is probably not safe, and I'm cool with that. Not everyone has their vices but I have mine.
"folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals."
They might be, or might not. It never fails to amaze me that a pill is hyper regulated, food is somewhat regulated, and at least where I live vape juice is completely unregulated for a couple more years. Whats in there, THC, benzene, used engine oil, who knows.
Obviously its trivial to make a substance that when vaporized is harmless; consider pure distilled filtered water. Its a hair trickier to supply nicotine with the vapor. But when they go all ochem crazy with flavors and smells, who knows whats in there and how long the users will live.
The FDA is moving extremely slowly on regulating vape juice. In a couple years it'll at least be licensed and documented. Until recently it was complete wild west.
I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.
>I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.
Quite the opposite, it’s lack of money. The FDA moves fast in fields and products where they already have budget and staff allocated to doing it. They’re slow about moving to regulate new things because, unless there is a concomitant increase in budget, they have to move people off of work on one thing and on towards another. This, of course, has all sorts of inter-departmental politics involved as branch managers measure the sizes of the peens by how much budget and staff they have under them.
Incidentally, a lot of the money about FDA’s regs in this area are actually coming from the cigar industry which fears, more than anything, being subjected to the same regulatory nightmare that the cigarettes manufacturers are mired in.
But the manufacturer doesn't have to disclose that information if there's no regulation compelling them to, or they can downright lie if nobody's there watching them. Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.
>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”
> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.
>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”
> Or just put random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety.
a) Do you honestly think companies would do this?
b) The same silly "risk" applies to most any manufacturer - having a "regulation" in no way guarantees your cereal manufacturer isn't putting poison in your cereal, because why wouldn't he, right? (To use similar logic).
> The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others.
And the source manufacturer (country) of these? Zero details, as usual. Shall we stop selling infant formula in the US because infant formula contains melamine which can and does kill people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
If these agencies weren't deliberately so opaque, I'd perhaps be less distrustful.
Perfectly fair final point on inhalation of flavors, and good luck finding anyone in the industry that is opposed to further testing. Everyone very much wants a safe product.
And um, yes, the supplement industry is essentially unregulated and is notorious for doing exactly that - putting random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety and isn't listed on the label. That's up to and including controlled prescription medications.
The supplement industry is very different, in many different ways, a gigantic one being source of ingredients.
The point is, we have uncertainty being printed as confirmed danger, in a billion dollar industry (with a very well documented history of deceit) selling a product known to kill, at risk of being completely disrupted. Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical of misleading claims.
Okay, but they're still very different things one is inhaling. E-cigarettes could easily be far, far safer than cigarettes while still being dangerous.
But no one is saying they aren't unhealthy. Only that they are (probably/possibly) less harmful. On the other hand the title of this article says they are the same (not that the article matters, I've seen too many papers with broken methodology, I'll have to check the referenced paper).
I smoked from the age of 16 until the age of 26 when I made the decision to switch to e-cigs. Within the year after I started using e-cigs I had tapered the nicotine content of the juice down to 0. I abandoned e-cigs entirely and have been tobacco/nicotine free since last April aside from one or two cigars. I truly believe that I would not have been able to quit smoking as easily and painlessly without e-cigs and therefor I am a huge believer in their use as a smoking cessation tool...I wish more people understood just how easy it was for me to quit with their use.
>The fact remains, folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals
except it's not a "fact". The fact that it is not "a fact" is precisely why you see studies coming out time and time again which attempt to figure out exactly which byproducts of the VG, PG, and Nicotine are created and how they affect the body.
Their testing methodology doesn't appear to have vaporized the liquid. I wonder if this has an impact on the results, given that the method of producing the gas is different.
It looks like two things are being tested here:
1) Toxicity of e-cigs
2) the validity of this new testing device created from a 3D printer
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. A demonstration of the toxicity of e-cigs should be based on well-established testing methods. And a new testing device should be tested to see if it reliably replicate findings that used well-established testing methods.
It's not even close to conclusive, I think you'd be hard pressed to call it science. Whenever you read these "studies" there is so much defensive language and obvious outright lies, you can tell it is a propaganda piece.
> "potentially as harmful"
> "may contain"
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
> "found that vapor from non-nicotine e-cigarettes caused as much DNA damage as filtered cigarettes" (at best they have a theory)
> "whether they serve as a gateway for future tobacco smokers remains the subject of much debate" (if you call lobbyist propoganda "debate")
> "new metabolites that have the potential to cause DNA damage are formed"
> "The device is unique in that it converts chemicals into their metabolites during testing, which replicates what happens in the human body, Kadimisetty says." (Does it? Is this scientifically confirmed with high certainty?)
> "Bioassays currently used to determine the genotoxicity of environmental samples may be more comprehensive" ("May" be? If you are speculating on that, then how do you know that the results from these tests are trustworthy, as you are claiming?)
> "There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says." (Well, depends on your definition of chemicals)
> "Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes." (Oh? Which ones? And what was the source of the ejuice used for testing?)
I can't read the full study, as it's behind a paywall - so take this with a grain of salt:
> "potentially as harmful"
That's not 'defensive language', that's rightly acknowledging that a single study isn't enough to determine one way or the other.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
What's 'unscientific' or 'defensive' about acknowledging that a substance has a certain probability of causing cell damage? Claiming that something 'always' or 'never' causes cell damage, on the other hand, would be unscientific.
> that's rightly acknowledging that a single study isn't enough to determine one way or the other
When read by a scientist, when read by mainstream consumers it is historically referred to as FUD.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
"potential" vs "as much potential"....so how are they measuring the level of potential? Since this is new technology, is it even proven accurate (cast is doubt elsewhere in the document).
This article implies certainty, but of course never states it outright, but it achieves its goal: instill fear. And in this case, that fear can affect sales in the hundreds if not billions of dollars, and might(!) literally be the the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.
Benzo[a]pyrene is a product of incomplete combustion and is basically found wherever organic stuff (in the carbon containing sense) is burned with low available oxygen. It's super carcinogenic by way of intercalating between DNA basepairs leading to misread transcripts. Since nothing is being burned in a vaporizer unless something has horribly gone wrong, this is highly unlikely to be present in vapor.
These are nitrated derivatives of nicotine. If they were in the eliquid, it's likely due to impurities in the nicotine. However, it's been previously shown [1] that they're not present in vapor in any significant quantity.
It's worth noting that the paper was published in ACS Sensors, a journal on the topic of "new and original knowledge on all aspects of sensor science that selectively sense chemical or biological species or processes." So, the sensor-validation angle was the primary focus of the study. They also tested treated versus un-treated wastewater.
I can't get past the paywall, so I couldn't say if they give any justification for whether their sensor would be a good indication of in vivo behavior or not. In order for dangerous DNA damage to occur, the offending compound (or relevant metabolite) would have to get into cell nuclei in meaningful quantities, which is far from a given.
"UConn researchers found that e-cigarettes loaded with a nicotine-based liquid are potentially as harmful as unfiltered cigarettes when it comes to causing DNA damage."
So in other words, less dangerous. (Given that most of the harms caused by smoking don't come from DNA damage.)
Pharmaceutical smoking cessation aids have something like $6B in annual sales. E-cigarettes are generally more effective at quitting smoking than other means like patches or gums. They're also a market where there are much fewer patent protections for extracting rents out of.
I generally take a pretty cynical look at scientific findings that help protect multi-billion dollar industries.
Fresh water is potentially as harmful as salt water, depending on how you utilize it.
E-Cigs potentially saved my sons life. He grew up around smokers. I had no control over this. Now that he lives with me, I fully support the use of E-Cigs. He has almost stopped using E-Cigs and he has stopped smoking tar+tobacco cigarettes completely.
Traditional cigarettes for certain are carcinogens and there is no dispute they cause cancer and kill people.
Anybody read the actual paper? I'm wondering what concoction of PG VG nicotine and what flavorings were used. It's already been shown that fruity juices vaporize into formaldehyde, so I'm wondering if they tested pure vegetable glycerin vapor as a control and what were the effects.
174 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThe claim in the title is utterly false because nicotine isn't the only health risk issue with tobacco cigarettes. Essentially the results show that vaporized chemical nicotine can cause the same amount of damage regardless of how the chemical was vaporized. In summary they proved the obvious.
Edit: The term 'potential' in the research has a very clear and rigorous meaning, the term 'potential' in the title is clickbait bullshit.
Anytime results are not conclusive but still point towards a certain outcome?
I don't like the way they've titled their research. Given that there are numerous chemical additives in traditional chemical cigarettes that are known to cause health issues nicotine may not be the dominantly harmful component in cigarettes.
Discouraging cigarette smokers from moving to e-cigarettes is akin to abstinence only programs, it's not a pragmatic approach to the realities of the problem and human behavior. Of course the tobacco industry also has a vested interest in cigarettes so it's favorable to them for media to be as negative as possible about eCigarettes.
If eCigarette second hand smoke is less harmful than cigarettes and they aren't banned in the places that regular cigarettes are it would create a strong downward pressure on traditional cigarette smoking...
..and it looks like the Altria group does recruit from UConn, if that actually means anything.
So even if I smoke 30% more than I used to I'm probably consuming significantly less harmful chemicals in the end, including nicotine. Which means it will probably be easier to quit vaping than cigarettes, especially as I could taper the nicotine percentage from 6mg -> 0mg over a period of time without adjusting behaviour.
On the other hand I hardly ever felt any vapour smell from e-cigarettes.
Also... Smoke is a mixture of gas and solid materials, while vapour is a mixture of gas and liquid.
I think using precise terms in a debate brings extra clarity into it, so instead of inventing poetic proxy terms, like e-smoke, let's just use the more commonly understood word "vapour" instead.
I knew a friend with a much, much worse smell allergy where a smell of the right color dye would cause seizures and possibly kill them.
To combat this, tobacco companies put some sugar on the filter tip and I believe better tobacco in the very tip of the cigarette, this way the first hit is better than all of the others.
It might just be the placebo effect that makes it taste better after, but who cares?
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/38/8593
I read a study showing that the absorption rate of nicotine is about half through an e-cigarette, because of other chemicals in normal cigarettes that increase the rate.
I went to an 80 year old's birthday party recently and he has been smoking since WW2 or thereabouts. His advice - get a pipe and buy tobacco from a proper tobacconist. In that way he avoids all the chemical horrors of regular hand rolling tobacco. Normally this stuff has flavours in it, stuff to make it burn and stuff to keep it moist. The difference is huge.
My advice to the government is to ban adulterated tobacco products so only dry rolling tobacco is for sale. Then to apply a minimum age to buy tobacco with this age rising one year every other year. In a relatively short period of time tobacco will become as rare as pipe smoking is.
Pipe tobacco isn't that much "safer", either.
Ideally, you'd get all the addicts to move to e-cigs, and everybody else to not use either one. Not that I have any brilliant ideas how to accomplish that.
If the risk profile for cigarettes is just barely too high for a non-smoker then e-cigarettes may be the last 'push' Although this does require some assumptions about why individuals start smoking cigarettes in the first place.
In any case, it seems like much of the e-cig debate comes down to this. Those in favor see it as an alternative to cigarettes for smokers. Those against see it as a way to get non-smokers to consume tobacco.
I expressed skepticism that burning random chemicals and inhaling the resulting smoke is healthy. Good to have some evidence to back that up.
Why? If it doesn't have health costs, there's not much reason you should care. This study isn't even on the same planet as measuring health costs.
Same goes for almost everything.
To the first order of approximation, nicotine addiction is bad for your health because it causes you to burn and inhale plant matter, the common delivery methods of nicotine are horribly unhealthy but if you're talking about nicotine as such (for example, through a transdermal patch) then it doesn't really have significant adverse health effects.
But more to the point, there was little reason to believe it would cause cancer in the first place, compared to any other random compound. Its association with tobacco is a wash, because other compounds, like aldehydes, are completely sufficient to explain the carcinogenicity of smoking tobacco.
Everything in it is evidenced by as much research as they can get.
https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...
I agree that it's a bad idea to take nicotine in any form unless you need to, but it seems that nicotine is one of the less harmful parts of tobacco.
For chewing tobacco it's probably not the nicotine that's causing cancer, but all the other stuff.
Just like a light hit on the head would increase awareness, but increasing the force and repetition of the hits on the head is not well advised, when the effect wears off after overuse - to say nothing about the immediate effect of getting hit.
The perceived short term benefits are only secondary effects. And with regards to nicotine, all the arguments in favor are to be treated as extraordinary claims.
I wonder how the testing methodology works.
For analysis of nicotine as such, you can refer to the known side-effects of nicotine dermal patches; they're well researched, approved by FDA, etc - the place of application can get skin irritation and itchiness; overdose of nicotine can get dizziness, headache, rapid heartbeat, and nausea (same as for too much nicotine through other means), but they're not known to cause cancer or other significant damage despite being used by very many people over very long time.
Nicotine also has benefits - most notably, it is a stimulant. The question is what tradeoffs you are making by consuming nicotine.
https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
I'd suppose other chemicals in traditional cigarettes fill very similar roles.
Imagine you want your house to smell like coffee. So you heat a baking tray until it is white hot. Then drip coffee onto the tray (don't actually try this). Much of the coffee will be vaporized with the water in it providing a nice aroma. But some of it will be in direct contact with the tray and will burn and have a nasty smell. The hotter the tray is, the more the coffee gets burned and transformed into not-coffee. E-cigs are like that, except one doesn't notice the nasty aroma of the accidental chemicals.
It should also be noted that abstinence only sex ed usually involves many outright lies, such as that sex outside of marriage is objectively immoral, that waiting until marriage prevents STIs, vastly exaggerated figures for the risk of disease and failure rates of birth control, etc. Whereas smoking is actually dangerous, and "don't smoke, it'll greatly increase your chances of getting these various horrible diseases" is actually truthful.
Though I think the true implication is "don't have sex until an impulse comes along to do so, that is strong enough to completely drown out the voice of your superego in your head. And then—if the impulse really is that strong—the 'proper' order to do things is to get married to that person, and then have sex with them."
All I ever see is picture of black lungs, messages of certain cancer and death. To me, this is like those people who have pictures of dead fetuses for their anti-abortion message. It's extreme, and sets of red-flags in my brain.
I fucking love smoking. It gives me a way to chill out and unwind for 10-15 minutes. It's great for my mental health, because I won't do it in my house... I have to get away from the computer, I have to stop what I'm doing. It gets me away from everything.
"Light and intermittent smoking carry nearly the same risk for cardiovascular disease as daily smoking.... In addition, the risk of ischemic heart disease in light-smoking men and women aged 35 to 39 years who smoke 1 to 4 cigarettes per day is nearly 3 times that of a nonsmoker."
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/13/1518
There's nothing wrong with taking a calculated risk, but it is a risk.
I expect it's still a significant health risk, but I've never seen studies on people who don't smoke daily.
How the damage happens is not important, but consider the possibility of slowly accumulating effects because of a slow rehabilitation potential.
Me too. I haven't had a cigarette in over a decade, but I remain hopeful that modern science will find a cure for cancer and other smoking-related diseases during my lifetime, so I can resume smoking again. This probably sounds nuts to non-smokers and I won't bother explaining it any further.
As an aside, I am one of many who tried e-cigarettes when they came out because they were very convenient, and ended up quitting. They were new and not banned anywhere yet, so I could 'smoke' even more. I never liked smoking indoors and do not like the stale tobacco smell so they were great. For reasons I don't really understand my tobacco habit gradually tapered off and I no longer smoke anything, but I do miss it.
I think I have heard this from a couple of e-cigarette using colleagues: once the switched to e-cigarettes stopping became easier.
(One of them explained that he used weaker and weaker refills until it was basically just water. I guess at that point it just feels stupid.)
First of all, I envy you. You're a "chipper" and make up about 5% of the population of smokers. I on the other hand am in the Majority. It's either zero or a pack a day. The black lung photos didn't contribute to my cessation. Instead I had to grow up and decide I didn't like feeling like garbage. That said, If the black lung applies to that 95% of us that can't stop at just one, it's probably the right message.
5% source: http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-18/news/ls-44883_1_heavy...
Getting back to the original topic, we need to know more information about the other additives in e-cigs as well. There are kids at my child's high-school that smoke non-nicotine e-cigs supposedly because they like the taste (they come in fruity flavors).
And in that cotext such dismissive reaction makes sense to me.
That agreement isn't working very well, lots of sellers will sell to people who say "I've never smoked".
It's a shame, because that's the kind of thing that could force more regulation.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39523857
> The Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) said 87% of shops were knowingly or unwittingly prepared to sell e-cigarettes to people who have never smoked or vaped.
The whole idea seems kind of pointless. If someone want to vape, let them.
I think there's been a little bit of research showing some young people moving to smoking from vaping.
Based on your above comment, it sounds like you think that they tested for nicotine specifically. They did not. From the press release:
There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says. Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. They then loaded their device’s microwells with specific enzymes that would convert those chemicals into metabolites. If these chemicals were in the sample, the test gave them a reading for genotoxicity. If the chemicals were not present, there would be no reaction.
Based on that paragraph, and other sentences throughout the press release, my interpretation is that their findings are that e-cigarettes are potentially as harmful as cigarettes. Some of the comments in this thread make it sounds like the researchers showed that just the nicotine in e-cigarettes is as potentially harmful as just the nicotine in cigarettes, but that's not my reading.
E-cigarette liquid, at it's base, has two chemicals: propylene glycol and nicotine.
Anything other than that is a flavor additive, or a smoke volume additive (glycerine). PG and Glycerine are extensively studied and safe for human consumption, PG is actually used in nebulizer treatments for people with asthma.
Furthermore, a proper e-cigarette doesn't cause a chemical change in the liquid- it's only a physical state change. That precludes the oxidation reactions that characterize tobacco smoking.
So my skepticism is really tweaked by this article. Yes, someone could potentially add hundreds of flavoring chemicals. Definitely room for a problem there, so address that. The essential cigarette is only two to three chemicals.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01741
While I'm not sure what temperature these devices target, what I know is that the researchers found that longer into a usage session the coils became hotter and produced larger quantities carcinogens.
My understanding though is that while e-cigarettes do produce carcinogens, they produce less quantities than regular cigarettes do.
I guess you had the link to the survey ready and just forgot to paste it. Would you find that again, please?
A successful vaporization requires temperatures of 150-200°C with a max of 250 for self-experimenting enthusiasts.
So when these studies include the chemicals caused by pyrolysis, they're not studying realistic e-cigarette use.
A good analogy would be studying the consumption of improperly distilled alcohol that included methanol- EXCEPT you wouldn't be able to taste the methanol in bad liquor, and you'd absolutely be able to taste burnt e-liquid.
Which of course doesn't mean it is good for us but I think establishes that the danger from that is probably less scary than that sounds
So, yes, I agree: this warrants much further study. I have not come to any conclusions, but I have updated my priros. But, independent of that, I felt some comments in this thread were misrepresenting what the research did.
The authors' title, as it appears in the journal the study was submitted to is "Automated 3-D Printed Arrays to Evaluate Genotoxic Chemistry: E-Cigarettes and Water Samples" (see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118).
The "E-cigarettes ‘Potentially as Harmful as Tobacco Cigarettes’" title comes from "UConn Today", a university news site.
Just to be clear that the academics didn't choose this silly title.
Ultimately, like smoking, using e-cigarettes is smelly and unhealthy. Regulators aren't going to allow for them to be presented as harmless because they aren't and science isn't going to ignore the harmful effects because they do exist. The only reason e-cigarettes are not banned in all the places cigarettes are is because the rules are about burning tobacco and politics makes it difficult to change the rules.
> "...the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals..."
> "...something in the e-cigarettes was definitely causing damage to the DNA."
What three carcinogenic chemicals did they test for? I hate when these studies are locked behind a paywall.
NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine
The use of E-cigarettes should be encouraged as a middle-ground to cure (yes cure, addiction is a disorder) those who still smoke.
I would have liked to see control experiments: analyse the e-liquid without vaporization, and analyse pure glycerol/propylene glycol. The former may show a response, but the latter should not show any at all.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acssensors.7b00118/sup...
when used normally, the ecig should only vaporize the PG and nicotine (2 ingredients). if you burn the mixture, that's where you get a cocktail of chemicals akin to a cigarette
it's admittedly hard to describe but a really vital difference. its the difference between warming a cookie and burning a cookie. the soot from the burnt cookie is way more toxic than a properly warmed cookie
that said, i welcome more information about e-cigs for sure. but as an ex-smoker who used ecigs's step-down method and finally quit last year, we need to be very careful before crucifying this very effective cessation device
A few years ago I read a convincing article to the contrary from the NHS. Detailing how the most dangerous carcinogens came from combustion of tobacco.
Smoking related signalling has been a train wreck for a decade or more now, so of course after this article came out the very same NHS started talking about banning certain types of e-cigarettes. I don't know what's going on anymore. It doesn't help that there are zealots that spam information about e-cigarettes being perfectly safe, and charities that spam information about cigarettes killing you and everyone around you so donate right away.
The internet has utterly failed us on data about smoking. If anyone knows what's actually going on, then they are lost in a sea of other people that are doing their best to shout over one another.
Lol - like most of the modern world - Internet or not. :)
Wikipedia seems fairly rational about nicotine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine
It seems to boil down to "mostly harmless" whereas all the delivery technologies for it, other than the patch, seem to be almost infinitely more dangerous than the nicotine itself.
From the Wikipedia article:
> by the 1980s the use of nicotine insecticide had declined below 200 tons. This was due to the availability of other insecticides that are cheaper and less harmful to mammals.
> Currently, nicotine, even in the form of tobacco dust, is prohibited as a pesticide for organic farming in the United States/
Actually the thing that pisses me off about e-cigs is the clouds of flavoured vapour that I get bombarded with. I don't want to inhale second hand raspberry flavoured steam.
Though quite happy inhaling diesel particles every day no doubt?
What leads you to that conclusion?
No, I do not _happily_ inhale diesel particles ever.
Luckily I live in a country where diesel pollution is now taken seriously so the problem is declining but the use of e-cigarettes is increasing.
This is also laughable considering how utterly terrible cigarette smoke is—I can't even imagine how I would make a vapor that harmful without combusting something.
This is exactly the type of study you see when someone has it out for e-cigarettes. Who is it? I smell Philip Morris cash.
I mean, it wouldn't be hard. Plenty of simple chemical reactions produce dangerous vapors.
The fact remains, folks using e-cigarettes are still inhaling dangerous chemicals. You'd have to be crazy to suggest this is probably not dangerous. Just because it's delivered slightly differently doesn't really make it ok.
Edit: And I do accept that vaping is probably not safe, and I'm cool with that. Not everyone has their vices but I have mine.
They might be, or might not. It never fails to amaze me that a pill is hyper regulated, food is somewhat regulated, and at least where I live vape juice is completely unregulated for a couple more years. Whats in there, THC, benzene, used engine oil, who knows.
Obviously its trivial to make a substance that when vaporized is harmless; consider pure distilled filtered water. Its a hair trickier to supply nicotine with the vapor. But when they go all ochem crazy with flavors and smells, who knows whats in there and how long the users will live.
The FDA is moving extremely slowly on regulating vape juice. In a couple years it'll at least be licensed and documented. Until recently it was complete wild west.
I've never seen the FDA move on anything so slowly. There must be a lot of political money involved.
Quite the opposite, it’s lack of money. The FDA moves fast in fields and products where they already have budget and staff allocated to doing it. They’re slow about moving to regulate new things because, unless there is a concomitant increase in budget, they have to move people off of work on one thing and on towards another. This, of course, has all sorts of inter-departmental politics involved as branch managers measure the sizes of the peens by how much budget and staff they have under them.
Incidentally, a lot of the money about FDA’s regs in this area are actually coming from the cigar industry which fears, more than anything, being subjected to the same regulatory nightmare that the cigarettes manufacturers are mired in.
The manufacturers know. Acting as if it is a complete mystery is disingenuous.
http://www.webmd.com/smoking-cessation/news/20150218/e-cigar...
>The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others. All but one of the cartridges labeled “no nicotine” did, in fact, contain nicotine. The authors suggest that “quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or non-existent.”
> Flavorings: Goniewicz says hundreds of flavors exist, including cherry, cheesecake, cinnamon, and tobacco. Many of those flavoring chemicals, he says, are also used to flavor food.
>“These are the big unknowns,” he says. “When we eat them, they are safe, but we don’t know what’s going on when we inhale them.”
a) Do you honestly think companies would do this?
b) The same silly "risk" applies to most any manufacturer - having a "regulation" in no way guarantees your cereal manufacturer isn't putting poison in your cereal, because why wouldn't he, right? (To use similar logic).
> The results of one FDA review of 18 different e-cigarette cartridges found toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in some but not others.
And the source manufacturer (country) of these? Zero details, as usual. Shall we stop selling infant formula in the US because infant formula contains melamine which can and does kill people? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
If these agencies weren't deliberately so opaque, I'd perhaps be less distrustful.
Perfectly fair final point on inhalation of flavors, and good luck finding anyone in the industry that is opposed to further testing. Everyone very much wants a safe product.
And um, yes, the supplement industry is essentially unregulated and is notorious for doing exactly that - putting random shit in there that hasn't been tested for safety and isn't listed on the label. That's up to and including controlled prescription medications.
https://www.livescience.com/40357-herbal-products-unlisted-i...
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/21/dangerous-dietary-...
Nor did I ever say, or even imply, we should stop selling e-cigs or any other product for that matter.
The point is, we have uncertainty being printed as confirmed danger, in a billion dollar industry (with a very well documented history of deceit) selling a product known to kill, at risk of being completely disrupted. Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical of misleading claims.
A very different mix of chemicals. Even if current mixes are terrible, it should be possible to find options that are a lot better.
except it's not a "fact". The fact that it is not "a fact" is precisely why you see studies coming out time and time again which attempt to figure out exactly which byproducts of the VG, PG, and Nicotine are created and how they affect the body.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. A demonstration of the toxicity of e-cigs should be based on well-established testing methods. And a new testing device should be tested to see if it reliably replicate findings that used well-established testing methods.
There's a lot about the article that smells bad.
> "potentially as harmful"
> "may contain"
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
> "found that vapor from non-nicotine e-cigarettes caused as much DNA damage as filtered cigarettes" (at best they have a theory)
> "whether they serve as a gateway for future tobacco smokers remains the subject of much debate" (if you call lobbyist propoganda "debate")
> "new metabolites that have the potential to cause DNA damage are formed"
> "The device is unique in that it converts chemicals into their metabolites during testing, which replicates what happens in the human body, Kadimisetty says." (Does it? Is this scientifically confirmed with high certainty?)
> "Bioassays currently used to determine the genotoxicity of environmental samples may be more comprehensive" ("May" be? If you are speculating on that, then how do you know that the results from these tests are trustworthy, as you are claiming?)
> "There are potentially hundreds of chemicals in e-cigarettes that could be contributing to DNA damage, Kadimisetty says." (Well, depends on your definition of chemicals)
> "Rather than test for all of them, the UConn team targeted three known carcinogenic chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes." (Oh? Which ones? And what was the source of the ejuice used for testing?)
EDIT: The three chemicals (thanks xaedes): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539062
B[a]P: Benzo[a]pyrene
NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine
I haven't a clue what these are, and in which component of the juice (PG, VG, nicotine, flavor) would contain them....anyone?
> "potentially as harmful"
That's not 'defensive language', that's rightly acknowledging that a single study isn't enough to determine one way or the other.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
What's 'unscientific' or 'defensive' about acknowledging that a substance has a certain probability of causing cell damage? Claiming that something 'always' or 'never' causes cell damage, on the other hand, would be unscientific.
When read by a scientist, when read by mainstream consumers it is historically referred to as FUD.
> "have as much potential to cause DNA damage"
"potential" vs "as much potential"....so how are they measuring the level of potential? Since this is new technology, is it even proven accurate (cast is doubt elsewhere in the document).
This article implies certainty, but of course never states it outright, but it achieves its goal: instill fear. And in this case, that fear can affect sales in the hundreds if not billions of dollars, and might(!) literally be the the difference between life and death for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.
Benzo[a]pyrene is a product of incomplete combustion and is basically found wherever organic stuff (in the carbon containing sense) is burned with low available oxygen. It's super carcinogenic by way of intercalating between DNA basepairs leading to misread transcripts. Since nothing is being burned in a vaporizer unless something has horribly gone wrong, this is highly unlikely to be present in vapor.
> NNK: 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanone
> NNN: N-Nitrosonicotine
These are nitrated derivatives of nicotine. If they were in the eliquid, it's likely due to impurities in the nicotine. However, it's been previously shown [1] that they're not present in vapor in any significant quantity.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4555263/
I can't get past the paywall, so I couldn't say if they give any justification for whether their sensor would be a good indication of in vivo behavior or not. In order for dangerous DNA damage to occur, the offending compound (or relevant metabolite) would have to get into cell nuclei in meaningful quantities, which is far from a given.
It can be better, or the same. Can't be worse, and you might leave it altogether in the end if you make the switch.
2. "...when it comes to causing DNA damage" is the far less sensationalist claim in the actual text.
So in other words, less dangerous. (Given that most of the harms caused by smoking don't come from DNA damage.)
I generally take a pretty cynical look at scientific findings that help protect multi-billion dollar industries.
E-Cigs potentially saved my sons life. He grew up around smokers. I had no control over this. Now that he lives with me, I fully support the use of E-Cigs. He has almost stopped using E-Cigs and he has stopped smoking tar+tobacco cigarettes completely.
Traditional cigarettes for certain are carcinogens and there is no dispute they cause cancer and kill people.
I use unflavored e-juice. It's VG, PG, and nicotine. Three ingredients.