The Jekyll-Hyde of e-cigarettes
While e-cigarettes or vaping may help some adults quit smoking tobacco, new studies suggest it may start teens on cigarettes and lead to a lifetime of tobacco use. Studies show more teenagers are using e-cigarettes than traditional tobacco products. This may be because of marketing that targets teens using candy or fruit flavored e-cigarettes. Their peers also heavily influence them.
In two thousand fourteen, a survey of those young people who used any tobacco or tobacco related product, found that sixty-three percent had used e-cigarettes prior to tobacco use. Teens believe e-cigarettes do not contain the cancer-causing chemicals in traditional cigarettes. While studies do show that e-cigarettes have lower levels of cancer-causing ingredients, they still emit substantial levels of carcinogens.
E-cigarettes contain acrylonitrile, acrolein, propylene oxide, acrylamide and crotanaldehyde. Plus, the compounds in flavoring can also become toxic.
In order to understand the path to tobacco use, researchers in the new study used simulation population models to compare smoking cessation versus vaping use. The model predicted that more than two thousand adult smokers would quit for at least seven years because of conversion to vaping. But it also predicted that nearly one-hundred-seventy-thousand young people would start with vaping and graduate to tobacco use. This math suggests the effects of e-cigarettes are far more negative than positive. The clincher is its conclusion that more than one and a half billion years of life would be lost due to e-cigarettes.
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