It seems that everywhere you go, someone is blowing vape in my face. Is it as bad as smoking?
It seems that everywhere you go, someone is blowing vape in my face. Is it as bad as smoking?
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hello everyone, Kevin Don the ‘Get-Fit Guy’ here and the big chat this week is going to be about vaping. Before we start, I want to state that I have never smoked a cigarette, I have never smoked a vape. So, I cannot have a subjective opinion on this, I can only dispassionately report the facts as they stand at this moment. As time moves forwards, no doubt we will have more information about vaping, since it is still a relatively recent trend. Therefore, the information I am sharing here may change in future.
I don’t know how it is where you are, but over here in the U.K. it seems that there is an epidemic of vaping. Crowds of people huddled round entrance ways to shops and buildings, all puffing away on candy or fruit flavoured ‘e-cigarettes’. Just like with smokers, I hold my breath as I pass them because, well, passive smoking is bad, so is passive vaping? Well, this is what we call an inductive argument. Kind of like when people take a study that was done on a tadpole in outer space and say that the same things will happen to humans here on earth. Inductive arguments are illogical. So, should I be holding my breath? And what’s the deal anyway with this one argument that vaping is ‘less bad’ than smoking so it can’t really be attacked. Surely if it’s bad, i’ts bad. Just being less bad is a weak position.
So, in case you have been blissfully unaware, what is vaping? It is marketed really as a way to stop smoking, or at least to swap a more expensive, more harmful habit for a cheaper, less harmful one. E-cigarettes, or vapes, heat a liquid inside into a vapour, which users then breathe in. Most of the time, certainly for those people trying to give up smoking, they contain nicotine, which is the main addictive chemical in ‘traditional’ cigarettes. What makes these traditional cigarettes so harmful for users and passive inhalers is tobacco, which has been positively linked to cancer.
As I said earlier, the biggest selling point for vapes is that they are marketed as a way to either stop smoking or reduce harm from smoking. Tobacco smoking is the biggest cause of cancer in the world. In the last decade in the U.K. alone, vaping has increased from around 800,000 users to close to 5 million. Currently, according to the Office for National Statistics, the cigarette smoking levels in the U.K. are at their lowest for 13 years.
So, the question is: are vapes less harmful than cigarettes? Well, as much as it loathes me to say it, yes they are. They do not contain tobacco and also do not contain any of the over 5000 chemicals that tobacco smoke is made up from. Let’s break down the risks and the study results (as they stand in March, 2024).
Cancer Risks
A 2018 review by Public Health England noted that “people who switched from smoking to vaping were exposed to less toxicants and carcinogens than in smoking.” The same review stated that “the biomarkers of exposure studies in this review provide conclusive evidence that vaping generally leads to lower exposure to many of the carcinogens responsible for the health risks of smoking.”
There are currently no studies that assess how vaping affects people with a previous cancer condition.
Respiratory Diseases
The same study found “conclusive evidence that under typical use conditions, exposure to most potent respiratory toxicants from vaping is significantly lower compared with smoking tobacco.” However, the study did note that there was insufficient evidence on the biomarkers to show if there is potential for respiratory disease in humans from vaping.
Similar findings were reported for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. However, the conclusions from the U.K. Government were that the different designs, diagnoses and measurements in the studies prevent us from making any conclusions. SO, it would seem that the current evidence points to vaping being less harmful to current smokers health than tobacco smoking. But what about the dangers to health from vapers who have never smoked and is that even a thing?
Why would someone who has never smoked take up a habit that is generally aimed at weaning people off smoking? Do you get people who have never taken heroin deciding to take methadone? Well, apparently it is a thing. Again, here in the U.K. the number of vapers who have never smoked is close to 400,000.
The question is that, although vaping is being used as a way to get off tobacco smoke…could it be used by non-smokers as a gateway to tobacco smoking? Well, a 2017 study established that indeed, young people who vape are more likely to move to tobacco smoking than young people who have never vaped. Vaping also causes nicotine addiction, with a 2018 study in the U.S. showing that 4% of under 18’s who have vaped but never smoked were demonstrating signs of nicotine dependency.
The main concern here is that in most young people, the brain does not stop developing until around the age of 25. Using nicotine in adolescence has been demonstrated to affect eh areas of the brain responsible for attention, learning , mood and impulse control. Nicotine also affects memory and skill development by interfering with the way synapses or connections are built between neurons in the brain.
So, it seems the question I have posed is rather nuanced and more complicated than purely asking if vaping is better than tobacco smoking. There is more to it than that and with the number one reason given by adolescents for taking up vaping as ‘someone I know vapes’ and that close to 5% of the number of vape users in the U.K. never having smoked, this needs to be investigated further. If there are health risks to using vapes, then perhaps the sale should be restricted to medical use only as a way to reduce toxic load in tobacco smokers, but at the same time protect others from developing a habit that could be harmful and is certainly not easy on the bank balance!
Now, it’s been a minute, so let’s do a listener email!
Hi Kevin,
I have recently started listening again to this podcast. I enjoy your approach, especially as a former teacher. I always liked being able to thread the needle of teaching my students how to think critically about topics while also giving them the necessary information to make informed judgements. You do this so well!
With that in mind, I wonder if you might be able to help me find out how to better search the internet when I’m experiencing fitness related injuries. I’ve had almost as little success with physical therapists as I have with googling my symptoms on my own.
My most recent problem has been pain in my right shoulder as I lift, I noticed it doing a machine assisted shoulder press. Stupidly, I felt it once and ignored it. The next time in the gym I went a little lighter and just pushed through the pain. I know better, but that’s what I did.
Now I am left wondering what I have done, how long to repair and recuperate and, most importantly, what muscles I’ve damaged or impacted and how to move forward. I feel clueless as to how best to research this on my own. I also feel pretty sure if I go about it on my own, the right way, I can figure it out?
I would think this can be help to a whole lot of us!!
Thank you in advance and thanks for the great work you’re doing in this podcast!!
Jane, Albuquerque
Hi Jane,
Thank you for the email, I am happy to hear that you enjoy the podcast. Thank you for being a listener.
I am sorry to hear that you have had no success with the injuries and physical therapists. I don’t have much love for physical therapists myself due to the same experiences. I am also very sure that there are physical therapists who are listening to this. If that is the case and you disagree with me, feel free to send me an email.
Generally speaking, I have found that there are many things which a physio can help you with. It is possible for them to use different diagnostic criteria such as visual assessment, movement assessment and manual palpation or the affected area. However, there are also some conditions, such as tendonopathy, which cannot be conclusively diagnosed in the absence of imaging. CT scan, ultrasound, MRI may be ways in which to detect many injuries and without those definite diagnostic tools, anything else is ‘best guess’.
There is also a broad spectrum of abilities across the spectrum of physios. Some are utterly wonderful. I have had a great physio in the past, in Hong Kong. But others are very poor and seem to exist by almost drawing the process out. I mean, if you make your income from injured people, maybe fixing them is a conflict to your self interest. Whilst the vast majority are honest, there are always some bad eggs in every profession.
In terms of how best to sort through information about potential injuries: don’t do it. Firstly, as you will have experienced, most websites talking about this are blogs by private therapists to drive business and if they aren’t it is the opposite end of the spectrum where its medical studies that are behind a paywall that you won’t have access to and are written in language that most of the general population can’t understand anyway. And if you do come up with a diagnosis, what then? What if you diagnose yourself with a torn rotator cuff? You still need to see someone for imaging and possible surgical intervention anyway. So skip the self diagnosis step out. If you go to a physio and the issue isn’t improving 4-6 weeks later, go see a doctor who specialises in that body part. I spent months and months and thousands of dollars on physios and lasers and injections about a decade ago. I eventually gave up and saw a specialist. Had a scan that day and surgery a week later. Problem solved.
As always, thank you for listening and send any fun emails to me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brannan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app