Photo by E-Liquids UK
There’s a reason so many smokers are switching from smoking cigarettes to vaping. Smoking tobacco cigarettes can cause many illnesses, including cancer, lung disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema, and chronic bronchitis. That’s not the case with vaping.
Vaping is far less harmful than smoking cigarettes because the main source of toxicity is the paper. Because they’re wrapped in paper, lighting a cigarette produces thousands of toxic chemicals that aren’t created when smoking pipe tobacco. However, smoking any kind of tobacco is bad for your health.
The best alternative to smoking is to quit entirely, but for many, it’s not that easy. That’s why so many people are choosing to vape. Although vaping is still considered bad for your health and can be addicting, it’s far less harmful than smoking cigarettes, and has even been proven to help people quit smoking. Vaping with disposable pods, like the ones made by Vuse, will also save you a lot of money compared to cigarettes.
If you’re considering vaping to stop smoking and you’re wondering if it’s the right move, here are some of the reasons vaping isn’t as harmful as cigarettes.
Vaping doesn’t produce the toxic chemicals found in burning paper
Since cigarettes are wrapped in paper that gets burned, they’re automatically more harmful than vaping. The paper alone makes cigarettes exponentially more toxic than vape juice.
Cigarette paper is not the same type of paper ancient peoples used to roll their tobacco. Today’s paper is toxic and contains more than 7,000 harmful chemicals. Some of these chemicals are used to treat the paper to control how fast it burns, like ammonium, sodium phosphate, and potassium citrate. There are also temperature control additives, like glycerine and glycol compounds.
There are a handful of harmful and potentially harmful substances in vape juice, but it’s the lesser of two evils when your goal is to reduce or eliminate cigarette addiction.
Vaping doesn’t produce tar or carbon monoxide
Burning a cigarette produces carbon monoxide, and that’s something you don’t get with a vape. Carbon monoxide is one of the worst chemicals you can put in your body because it reduces the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream by literally replacing the oxygen. As a result, tissues are starved and die from oxygen deprivation, leading to heart disease and even stroke.
Your lungs absorb oxygen through small tubes called bronchioles. Smoking cigarettes narrows these tubes because of the tar. Shockingly, the tar in cigarettes is the same type of sticky substance used in roadwork. Tar gets created when a certain combination of chemicals are burned together, so there’s no way to avoid this if you smoke.
There is no evidence that vaping can cause cancer
Unlike smoking cigarettes, which is known to cause at least 15 types of cancer, there is no evidence to suggest vaping causes cancer. Of course, vaping hasn’t been around as long as smoking, and it might take longer for cancer to become visible in people who vape regularly.
More studies on vaping need to be done long-term. However, even if vaping is shown to cause cancer in the future, it’s going to take a lot longer to show up if it does at all.
People who switch to vaping regain lung function
Some studies have shown that people who replace smoking with vaping see a noticeable increase in lung function in less than a year, at about 10%. In fact, when you stop smoking cigarettes, you stop pumping carbon monoxide (CO) through your bloodstream. After vaping for a while, you’ll gradually be reducing the amount of CO in your lungs and your blood oxygen levels will soon return closer to normal.
Granted, it’s not healthy to inhale any foreign substances into your lungs, but the fact that people regain lung function says a lot about the differences between vaping and smoking. Ideally, you should aim to quit all forms of nicotine addiction, including vaping, but there’s nothing wrong with using a vape to quit smoking first.
A vaping addiction isn’t as bad as a cigarette addiction
If you’re looking for a way to quit smoking or you just want a less harmful option, vaping might be the right choice for you. There’s still a chance that you might become addicted to vaping, but science shows that it’s not as harmful, so you’ll still be in a better position.
If you’ve tried everything else to quit, or you don’t want to waste any more time, why not try vaping? It just might be the right method for you.
