In this video, it is revealed that one in five high school students in the US vape, while 7% of kids aged 11 to 17 in the UK vape, which has nearly doubled in the past two years. Studies suggest that vaping is worse than smoking cigarettes due to the faster delivery of nicotine to the brain through the lungs. Vape smoke contains nicotine, chemical flavorings, and stage smoke, which can have detrimental effects on the body. Additionally, vaping has been associated with erectile dysfunction in men and severe lung issues, including deaths, especially in cases involving THC vapes. The long-term health effects of vaping, particularly on young people, are still being studied.
Key Insights:
- One in five high school students in the US vape, and in the UK, 7% of kids aged 11 to 17 vape.
- The number of young people vaping has nearly doubled in the last two years.
- Current statistics show that more young people vape than smoke cigarettes.
- Vaping delivers nicotine to the bloodstream and brain faster than cigarettes.
- Chemical flavorings and lack of regulation in vapes raise concerns about their safety.
- Studies indicate that vaping introduces nicotine into the body more intensely than cigarettes.
- Nicotine causes biochemical processes in the brain, increasing dopamine levels and affecting mood.
- Cravings for nicotine can start as soon as four hours after the last nicotine hit.
- Vaping can increase the risk of erectile dysfunction, especially in men.
- Vaping-related deaths and severe lung issues have been linked to THC vapes containing vitamin E acetate, which is less regulated than nicotine vapes.
- Flavorings added to vapes may contain chemicals that cause respiratory issues, inflammation, and lung damage.
- Vaping coils can release harmful substances like manganese and zinc, causing airway and tissue damage.
- Vapes still appear to be less harmful than traditional cigarettes, which involve combustion and the inhalation of tar and other chemicals.
- Smoking cigarettes globally affects 1.3 billion people and remains a leading cause of death.
- Although vaping is currently more prevalent in Europe, the US, and China, there is growing concern about the increasing number of young people who vape.
- Further research is needed to fully understand the long-term effects of vaping, especially on the lungs of young individuals.
Transcript
One out of every five high school students currently vapes in the US, and in the UK, 7% of kids aged 11 to 17 now vape. That number has nearly doubled in the last 2 years. Currently, more young people vape than smoke cigarettes. But with the news of vape deaths amongst young people, the insane chemical flavoring, and lack of regulation among new vapes, could science now say that vaping is worse than cigarettes?
To start, the nicotine in vapes hits your bloodstream and brain faster than cigarettes. This is because vapes consist of a coil that ranges from 110°C to 1,000°C, creating thermal conditions for a carrier like propylene glycol, which is literally stage smoke. Yes, when you’re vaping, you’re inhaling stage smoke right into your lungs, mixed with an active ingredient, most commonly nicotine and chemical flavorings.
The vape smoke hits your lungs in a way that studies show rushes nicotine faster into your bloodstream and brain than cigarettes. Another study found that the sheer way people hit vapes, like so hard, each puff gives you more nicotine in vapes than in cigarettes. And nicotine is an intense drug. I always say that the hardest drug I did this year at Pride was when I hit someone’s vape at a rave and I was ripped. This is because when you vape, the nicotine enters your bloodstream through the lungs, where it quickly makes its way to your head and passes through the blood-brain barrier to go directly into your brain.
Here, the nicotine causes a series of complex biochemical processes to increase dopamine, feelings of motivation, awareness, concentration, elevated mood, and other neurochemical processes that relax your muscles. Nicotine is an interesting drug. It makes you feel mentally aware and alert while physically relaxing you. It’s an amazing feeling that people get addicted to. As the nicotine rush ends, cravings begin, and most recent studies show that the cravings appear within 4 hours of your last nicotine hit.
In theory, this whole process is more intense with vapes than cigarettes because vapes have more nicotine in them. Nicotine also alters blood flow in your body, making people with penises lose their penis girth. Yep, a bit of watermelon ice can shrink your dick. One study found that men who use e-cigarettes are more than twice as likely to experience erectile dysfunction compared to those who don’t vape. 13,000 men aged 20 and older who had daily e-cigarette use were 2.2 times more likely to report having erectile dysfunction compared to men who had never vaped, regardless of other risk factors. Because ED is caused by nicotine, and there is more nicotine in vaping than cigarettes, in theory, you will get more erectile dysfunction from vaping.
Now, you may have also heard of the mysterious vaping deaths that, as of February 2020, had 287 patients hospitalized with severe lung issues from vaping. Some of whom were under 18 years old, and 68 people ended up dying. What you may not have heard is that these deaths were actually from THC vapes, which are less regulated than nicotine vapes. Some of the THC vapes had a chemical called vitamin E acetate in them, which, when inhaled, ravaged people’s lungs and alveoli, leaving them with symptoms of coughing, wheezing, and chest pain.
Doctors were shocked and scared at first, but the general consensus was that mistakenly, there was vitamin E acetate ending up in THC vapes, which was killing people. It created a disease called e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury, AKA EVALI. Now, the hope is that obviously there isn’t vitamin E acetate in THC vapes anymore, but again, EVALI was never caused by nicotine vapes. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other wild chemicals in these vapes because of the flavoring.
The concept of vaping was designed to be tasteless and ugly as a mechanism to help people quit cigarettes. But capitalism came a-calling, and to expand the vaping market, companies started adding flavorings to make people want to consume vapes more. Cinnamaldehyde, the artificial flavoring that creates cinnamon flavor in food, is now added to vapes to give them a cinnamony taste. But cinnamaldehyde has been found to make the cilia in your lungs stop working, making it harder for your lungs to get rid of debris and expel pathogens, leaving you more vulnerable to lung infection.
25-dimethyl pyrine is added to vapes to make them chocolaty, and isoamyl acetate is added to create a banana taste. These chemicals have been found to cause pro-inflammatory effects on the respiratory tract that lead to cancer. A recent study found vape smoke contains benzene and other volatile organic compounds, which lead to chronic respiratory conditions. Also, the vaping coils have manganese and zinc in them, which you end up inhaling, and this causes airway epithelial injury and tissue hypoxia. Mice chronically exposed to vape aerosols developed lung changes consistent with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, AKA COPD, the disease that kills 100,000 Americans a year from smoking.
But in the end, scientists and physicians agree that cigarettes are still worse than vapes. Cigarettes involve a combustion reaction with tobacco that causes you to inhale tar and other chemicals that ravage the lungs in unbelievable ways. One lung researcher compared smoking cigarettes to putting your mouth over a car exhaust pipe and inhaling. Also, you may not know this, but 1.3 billion people in the world currently smoke cigarettes, one in eight people is a smoker. This is why cigarettes are killing millions of people a year. Cigarettes are a worldwide trend, whereas right now, vaping is mostly relegated to Europe, the US, and China.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried because more than ever, young people are vaping, who have never even smoked cigarettes. And we do know that there are chemicals in these vapes that can kill you. And even though right now, they might not be considered worse than cigarettes, there’s still a lot we have to learn because these are a new concept. Scientists will continue to study how vaping affects people’s lungs, especially young people’s lungs.
So, if you want more information about vaping, you can click our podcast here. Thanks for watching our video about the insane way that humans have become addicted to getting nicotine into their lungs. Peace.
