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- Is “Vaping,” “Juuling,” “E-cigs,” Unhealthy or Not?
Is “Vaping,” “Juuling,” “E-cigs,” Unhealthy or Not?
“What we have to do is make a best guess based on what we currently know about electronic cigarettes aka vaping.”
I am a long-term cancer survivor. My son is a healthy college student who used to smoke cigarettes but agreed to vaping- in fact, Alex is fond of “juuling.”
I am both a cancer survivor and cancer coach. Having lived with cancer and its long-term and late stage side effects (brain damage, heart damage, nerve damage…) I view most everything in life as either an incresed risk or a decreased risk of chronic diseases like cancer.
Nutrition, lifestyle, alcohol, most anything during your day can either increase or decrease your risk of cancer.
The study linked and excerpted below is correct. It will be 20 or 30 years before we figure out the full health effects of vaping. Being a parent/cancer survivor, I want to talk to my son about vaping now, not in 20-30 years. So here are my assumptions now-
If I have to choose between my son smoking cigarettes or juuling, I’ll take juuling. My mom used to tell me stories about her sneaking behind the house to smoke tobacco wrapped in toilet paper. Many of my own friends, male and female, smoked. My point is that every generation tries smoking when they are young.
- I’m pretty sure that vaping is healthier than cigarette smoking-
- Vaping doesn’t seem to carry a second-hand smoke risk-
- Alex is going to do what he wants anyhow regardless of what I say-
- Vaping for Beginners
Please don’t misunderstand me. I don’t want my son to smoke anything. I’m being realistic.
Do you vape? Do you smoke cigarettes? What do you think? Scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
Thank you,
David Emerson
- Cancer Survivor
- Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Recommended Reading-
- Cancer Coaching: How to Avoid Caregiver Burnout: 7 Tips for Caregivers of Young Adult Cancer…
- Cancer Coaching-“Is my Oncologist Speaking a Foreign Language!?
- What NOT to say to Cancer Patients- Less is More
The Medical Minute: Full health effects of ‘vaping’ still unknown
“Cigarettes have been convicted of many crimes over the years. But the jury’s still out on whether their younger, more fashionable cousins – electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes – will meet the same fate.
Jonathan Foulds, professor of public health sciences and psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine, says it’s too early to know how vaping, as use of e-cigarettes is called, compares to smoking tobacco when it comes to health effects.
“It takes 20 to 30 years for smoking to cause a disease like lung cancer, so it is too soon to say with certainty,” Foulds says. “What we have to do is make a best guess based on what we currently know about electronic cigarettes.”
To help medical professionals make such guesses, Foulds conducted a study of more than 3,500 former smokers who switched to e-cigarettes. Those in the study reported feeling much less addicted to the e-cigarettes than they were to tobacco.
He says although e-cigarettes vary widely in terms of their design and nicotine delivery, the chemicals in the vapor emitted from e-cigarettes typically contain far fewer toxicants and in much smaller concentrations. One recently published study analyzed the urine of smokers and e-cig users and found that while the smokers had elevated carcinogen biomarkers, the e-cig users did not.
“It is very hard to imagine they can be even close to as harmful as cigarettes, the best guess is that they are at least 90 percent less harmful,” Foulds says.
Electronic cigarettes were invented in 2003, but have gained popularity in recent years as tobacco users began switching as a way to kick their habit. The devices come in varying brands and models, with a menu of tempting flavors.
Although they can be useful as a pathway to a smoke-free life, Foulds cautions that the electronic cigarettes are not approved by the Food & Drug Administration as smoking cessation devices.
“There is not enough data on how safe or useful they are for that,” he says.
It may be easier for children to obtain electronic cigarettes than regular tobacco cigarettes in some states that have yet to pass laws banning their sale to minors. However, Foulds says the prevalence of smoking in general among both adults and adolescents has decreased over the last three years since e-cigarettes have become popular.
While medical experts seem to agree that secondhand inhalation of the aerosol – or “vapor” – by those near an e-cigarette is less harmful than inhalation of cigarette smoke, it doesn’t mean it is acceptable.
“Any parent who is puffing away on an e-cigarette is not doing anything good for their children,” he says. “And when it comes to public policy, people in this country are used to breathing clean air in public places. Just because the vapor is better than smoke, it’s still worse than clean air.”
Foulds concludes that while electronic cigarettes can be a useful substitute for a lethal form of nicotine consumption, “Nobody who is currently a non-smoker should start using them.”