Vaping vs. Smoking: Which Is Less Harmful?

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are becoming increasingly popular, especially among young people. These battery-powered devices come in many different shapes and sizes. They can look like traditional cigarettes, pens, or even tech gadgets.

Vaping turns an e-liquid into an inhalable vapour and is a popular alternative to smoking tobacco cigarettes. In this article, we talk about the most recent research effects of vaping and compare them with that of cigarette smoking.

Vaping vs. Smoking: Which One Is Better?

As a smoker, the most important thing you can do to improve your health is to stop using tobacco products. Although it’s not easy to quit smoking, it is a goal you can reach. Vapes or e-cigarettes are safer for getting nicotine than inhaling regular cigarette smoke. Evidence suggests that vaping exposes you to less dangerous chemicals.

When tobacco is burned, a lot of the harmful and cancer-causing chemicals that are in burning tobacco are inhaled. Besides nicotine, most vaping products only have a small amount of the 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke.

When quitting smoking, you may switch from cigarettes to vaping products at some point. If you can’t stop smoking altogether, with counselling, medication, or approved nicotine replacement therapy, you may be able to lower your health risks.

Using Vape Pens vs. Smoking Tobacco Products

A lot of research has been done on the adverse health effects that may happen when you smoke. This evidence is one of the things that helped vaping become more popular. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 480,000 people in the United States alone die yearly from tobacco use. So, it is likely that the risks of smoking tobacco cigarettes are worse than the risks of vaping without nicotine.

On the other hand, there is more and more evidence that vaping may also be bad for your health. Researchers still need to do studies on a much larger scale and over a more extended period to fully understand the dangers of vaping over the long term. Early research suggests that inhaling vapour, with or without nicotine, can still harm your body.

Vaping, Tobacco Cigarettes, and Cancer

Cancer happens when toxins damage the DNA of cells, which makes the cells multiply and grow out of control. Cancer can stay in one organ and spread to other organs through metastasis. Most people know that cigarette smoking is one of the main reasons people get lung cancer. The CDC says that smoking can make almost every part of the body more likely to get cancer.

Even though carcinogens have been found in vaporizers, the levels of these carcinogens show that the risk of getting cancer is very low.

A 2017 study in the Tobacco Control journal found that the risk of getting cancer from vaping is about the same as from pharmaceutical products like nicotine gum or patches. This means that the risk of cancer from vaping is less than 1% of the risk of cancer from smoking.

The results of the research are the same as those of other studies. In a study done in 2016 and published in the journal Mutation Research, the ability of vapour from electronic cigarettes and smoke from regular cigarettes to change the DNA of bacteria cells was compared. The bacteria changed because the smoke was toxic to them, but the vapour was neither toxic nor mutagenic.

In addition, there is no proof that nicotine causes cancer, whether in tobacco cigarettes, e-cigarettes, or any other form. Long-term studies of people who use cessation aids show that there is no proof that nicotine causes cancer. But there are worries that nicotine may be a “tumour promoter,” which means that it makes tumours that are already there get bigger.

Which One Between E-cigarette Smoking and Tobacco Smoking Is Safer?

Smoking is more likely to be bad for your health than vaping. Even so, there is not enough proof to show that vaping is safe and has no health consequences. Secondhand smoke from tobacco contains thousands of different chemicals, and about 70% of them cause cancer.

In contrast to vaping, which has only been around for a very short time, research has been done for years to prove that smoking is bad for people’s health. About 80% of deaths due to smoking are caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

When you breathe in the vapour from an e-cigarette, there are no known carcinogens in concentrations high enough to be considered a severe risk. Since vaping does not involve combustion, no tar or carbon monoxide is produced, which are the most dangerous components of tobacco smoke.

If you are interested in using e-cigarettes, check out these popular and lab-tested vape cartridges that you can buy online:

• Hawaiian Punch Vape Cartridge by High Voltage Extracts: High Voltage Extracts specialize in craft-cannabis extractions. The company has recently gained recognition for its concentrates by getting nominations and awards at the 2019 Karma Cup. This cartridge contains 55% to 60% THC distillate and 40% to 45% natural cannabis-derived terpenes. As for the strain, the Hawaiian Punch is known to be an effective medication for anxiety, pain, headaches, stress, depression, and mood disorders. This strain has a sweet flavour and spicy aroma.
• Big League Grape Vape Cartridge or Pen by Unicorn Hunter: Unicorn Hunter is a Vancouver-based manufacturer of cannabis extracts. This disposable vape pen is discreet and easy to use. It contains 93% to 95% THC and 100% organic base oil. As for the strain, Big League Grape has a berry flavour with a nutty aroma. Its euphoric effects start in the head and quickly expand through your body.
• Banana Cream Pie Vape Cartridge or Pen by Unicorn Hunter: Unicorn Hunter is an expert in creating cannabis extracts and concentrates. You can recharge this premium disposable vape pen for 1 to 2 hours. It contains 93% to 95% THC and 100% organic base oil. As for the strain, Banana Cream Pie brings out a bold combination of banana, pine, and herbal aromas with lemon and vanilla flavours. It gives a feeling of lightness in the body, gradually turning into euphoria. The high THC concentration makes it an excellent pain reliever.

Five Things You Should Know About Vaping

You are not the only person who has thought about giving up smoking at some point in their lives. Almost seven out of ten people who smoke have said they want to stop. 

You might feel compelled to switch from regular tobacco to e-cigarettes, vape pens, and other vaping devices as a way to help you stop smoking for good. But is vaping really a healthier choice than using traditional tobacco products? To give you an idea, here are some things you should know about vaping:

Vaping Is Less Harmful Than Smoking, but It Is Still Not Completely Safe

Even though using an e-cigarette is less dangerous for your health than smoking, you should not consider it a completely safe habit. Vapes work by heating a mixture of nicotine from tobacco, flavourings, and other chemicals. This creates an aerosol, which you then breathe in. Regular tobacco cigarettes have about 7,000 chemicals in them, and most of them are poisonous.

Vaping almost certainly exposes you to fewer harmful chemicals than smoking regular cigarettes. However, ensure that the vaping device and e-liquid you use are bought from reliable dispensaries or shops. E-liquid is the liquid vaporized by vaping devices. Some people call it e-juice or vape juice.

E-liquids from different brands have a wide range of ingredients. Most of the time, the base liquid is a mix of many things, like water, vegetable glycerine, and propylene glycol, but not always. Then, manufacturers add different flavourings or additives to make a specific flavour.

Several food-grade ingredients used in e-liquids are given the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) certification by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Not much research has been done to determine if vaping with food-grade ingredients is safe.

Excessive Vaping Can Be Bad for Your Heart and Lungs

Excessive vaping and smoking cigarettes can lead to nicotine addiction. Nicotine is a chemical that can be harmful to your health. It increases your blood pressure and adrenaline levels, increasing your heart rate and risk of a heart attack. If you try to fight the urge to smoke, it will make you want cigarettes more, and if you give in to that craving, you will feel withdrawal symptoms.

Both Regular Cigarettes and E-cigarettes Deliver Nicotine

Nicotine is in both electronic cigarettes and regular cigarettes. Some studies have shown that nicotine can be as highly addictive as heroin and cocaine. If you use extra-strong cartridges with more nicotine or increase the voltage of your electronic cigarette to get a more potent dose of the chemical, you can develop nicotine addiction in the long run.

There Are Plenty of Alternatives to Smoking and Vaping

Even though e-cigarettes have been advertised as a way to help you quit smoking, the FDA has not approved them. It is vital to weigh the risks and benefits of vaping first and think about using other ways to quit smoking.

Many e-cigarette users have said that vaping helps them keep from wanting to smoke conventional cigarettes. But even if you vape nicotine-free e-liquids, vapes can still pose health risks. With this in mind, you can try to find alternatives to vaping. Here are some examples:

• Drinking sparkling water: When you drink a carbonated drink, you may feel a tingling and burning feeling in your throat, similar to vaping and smoking.
• Chewing gum: Chewing flavoured gum, whether it has nicotine or not, might give you a similar taste experience to vaping.
• Playing with a toothpick: Putting a toothpick in your mouth helps keep your hands and mouth busy. This can help people quit smoking or resist the urge to smoke or vape.
• Eat sunflower seeds: When you eat sunflower seeds, you must move your hand back and forth between your mouth and your hand several times. This action mimics what tobacco smokers and e-cigarette smokers do.
• Taking deep breaths: Using a vaporizer often requires you to take more deep breaths than you would typically take. Taking a few deep breaths can make you less likely to want to smoke or use a vaporizer.

Young Adults Are More Likely to Get Hooked on Nicotine Than Adult Smokers

E-cigarette use is more prevalent among young people than tobacco smoking. The National Youth Tobacco Survey in 2021 showed that more than 2 million students in the United States used e-cigarettes that year. Also, more than eight out of ten of these young people said they used electronic cigarettes with flavours.

There are three reasons why vaping might be more appealing to younger people:

1. A lot of young people have the wrong idea that vaping is safer than smoking.
2. The cost of using an e-cigarette is much cheaper than using tobacco cigarettes.
3. Using e-cigarettes produces vapour and not smoke, which removes the social stigma smokers have to deal with because they don’t stink.

Potential Adverse Effects of Vaping

When you vape without nicotine, you do not have to worry about becoming addicted to nicotine or other harmful chemicals. But using other nicotine replacement products does not entirely mean that vaping is less harmful than smoking.

Knowing the potential health consequences of using vapes is better. It will encourage you to use them in moderation. Let’s take a look at some adverse effects of vaping below:

Toxicity

E-liquids contain a wide range of chemicals, some of which may be potentially harmful substances. In 2012, a lab study found that the adverse effects of vaping were not caused by nicotine but by the chemicals that are used to flavour e-liquids. This is also true even if the e-liquids were made from food-grade materials.

A study published in 2015 found that when the propylene glycol and glycerol in e-liquids are heated, molecules are made that release formaldehyde. The International Agency for Research lists formaldehyde as a Group 1 carcinogen, which means it is one of many cancer-causing chemicals in people.

A more recent study looked at how different kinds of e-liquid affect vapers under the age of 25. The study compared three groups of young adults: those who had never used either traditional cigarettes or e-cigarettes, those who had only used e-cigarettes, and those who had never used either one.

The study showed that using e-cigarettes was less bad for your health than tobacco smoking. But comparing the results among the group, those who only used e-cigarettes had more harmful substances in their urine. These chemicals were made up of acrylonitrile, acrolein, propylene oxide, acrylamide-crotonaldehyde, and crotonaldehyde.

Other research backs up these findings by showing that the process of heating and vaporizing e-liquid chemicals makes them bad for lung cells. Several vaporizer makers also add vitamin E acetate, a thick compound that can harm the lungs, to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) vaping products. This will either make the liquid thicker or water it down.

Throat and Lung Irritation

Inhaling vaporized e-liquid might make your throat and lungs feel itchy in the short term. When you breathe in the e-cigarette vapour, you may feel like you are being pricked and burned. This kind of pain is called “vapour burn.” You may experience this as a result of the chemicals being heated and inhaled.

Experts say that breathing in too much propylene glycol and glycerol can make the airways feel itchy. They also say that the amounts of these compounds in an electronic cigarette are strong enough to cause irritation after just one puff.

Inflammation

In 2018, researchers published the results of a study that found that some common flavouring compounds in e-liquid caused lung cells to react in a harmful way. The study looked at e-liquids with no nicotine. If the lung tissue stays inflamed for a long time, it could lead to irreversible scarring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better for the lungs, vaping or smoking?

Although vaping has fewer health risks than smoking, we could not stress enough that you should not consider it 100% safe. For the best bet, you should try other alternatives to smoking and vaping like the ones we mentioned above. If you are a tobacco smoker and find the alternatives ineffective, then vaping in moderation might be a healthier option.

How many puffs in a vape are equal to a tobacco cigarette?

It is important to remember that there are e-juices out there with even less nicotine. You would need to take about 500 hits from your vape to get the same amount of nicotine as you would from smoking a cigarette. This is a significant change in how much nicotine is being used. Nevertheless, there isn’t a set number of puffs that can be considered safe. A safe daily dose of nicotine depends on a number of factors, including biological factors and the different effects of nicotine.

Can vaping damage your lungs?

Most of the time, diacetyl is added to flavoured e-liquid to improve the taste. However, inhaling diacetyl can cause inflammation and scarring in the smallest branches of your lung’s airways, making breathing hard. At the moment, there is no way to treat popcorn lung. If you have wheezing or noisy breathing, it could mean that something unusual is blocking or narrowing the airways in your lungs. If you cough up blood, it could come from your lungs or upper respiratory tract. Such signs are enough to tell you that you should immediately cease smoking.

What happens when you start vaping after quitting smoking?

If you stop smoking cigarettes and use an e-cigarette instead, your body will eliminate any remaining carbon monoxide within its system within twenty-four hours. Your lungs will also start cleaning themselves up as they work to eliminate the harmful substances and mucus that build up while smoking. The easiest way to switch from smoking to vaping is to slowly work it into your daily routine. Don’t rush, but make sure you push yourself to get to the next level.

Conclusion

Even if the e-cigarette you use does not contain nicotine, there is still a chance that vaping will cause adverse effects in other ways. The research on the effects of using a vaping device is still in its early stages, and large-scale studies are needed to determine what risks vaping poses over the long term.

Nevertheless, if you still want to try vaping as an alternative to smoking, ensure you only buy your cartridges and e-juices at a reliable dispensary or shop such as BudLyft. We only sell lab-tested and safe cannabis products. Placing your order now will make you eligible for our free same-day delivery service! Take the opportunity to sign up as a BudLyft affiliate to earn 10% commissions plus bonuses for every product sold through your referral link.