Vaping Is Too Good To Be True

What’s this? Oh, it’s only the  best calendar we ever made. Vaping is kind of amazing – finally  a less bad alternative to smoking.

It delivers one of the most popular  drugs in the world: Nicotine. It may improve your attention, concentration, memory, reaction time and endurance. It  can reduce anxiety and stress and help you relax and enhance your mood.

Nicotine also  suppresses hunger, making it easier to maintain or lose weight. And it is simply fun to put  a thing in your mouth and get a little kick. Compared to other stimulants,  nicotine's effect doesn't come at the same high price for our bodies.

It  is also crystal clear that vaping is way, way less harmful than smoking. Smoking delivers, well, hot smoke and extremely toxic particles  directly into your lungs, causing serious damage all over your body right away. But we will  purely focus on nicotine vapes in this video.

Ok sure, nicotine is one of the most addictive substances  we know. But vaping on its own seems kinda  ok. So is it really that bad if you do it?

Well, we should find out quickly. While in the  West smoking is slowly falling out of fashion, especially among teens vaping has become a  growing epidemic. In 2023, in the UK 20% of children have tried vaping at least once.

In  the US 8% of all students are currently vaping regularly. One in four of them do it daily,  and almost all of them use vapes with flavours. So how does vaping work and  what does it do to your body?

How does Vaping work? A vape is basically a small tank of liquid,  heated up by a metallic coil, that vaporises it. The major ingredient in most vape  juice is propylene glycol and glycerol, the main chemicals in smoke machines, which  are also used in countless chemical processes.

From food like candy and baking mixes, to  cosmetics, paints or plastics. Then there are the nicotine salts containing the magic  and dozens of different flavour molecules. When you pull on a vape, the metal coil heats up  and turns the liquid into the vapor you inhale.

Vapor sounds kind of nice, harmless and pleasant.  But vapes don’t produce actual vapor, but a heated mist of aerosol. A warm sticky substance  made out of large molecules and microscopic particles mixed with air.

The best thing to  compare it to is inhaling warm body spray. When you take a hit, billions of aerosol  particles cover your mouth and tongue making you taste pleasant stuff, and enter  into your lungs. They reach your alveoli, little air sacs where the breathing  happens.

Here the nicotine passes into your bloodstream and is transported into  your brain to cause all the pleasant effects. And here the complications begin. What is actually in your vape?

The scary answer is that we don’t really know. Studies found that vape liquids can be  thousands of very different mixes of many dozens of substances. The majority were  not even mentioned on the label.

This seems almost unbelievable, but the vaping industry  is much less regulated than you’d think. We know that many official substances  in vapes are technically safe. Kinda.

They’re used in cosmetics, medicine or  food and have been extensively tested. Most are safe to eat or put on your skin. But  that is not the same as breathing them in.

Cinnamaldehyde, found in cinnamon oil, kills  cells and causes genetic damage when inhaled. Benzaldehyde found in almonds or apples has a  fruity taste and is common in cherry, berry, chocolate or mint flavoured vapes. As a  gas, it irritates the respiratory tract.

What is worse is that we don’t know what many  substances in vape juice do if heated up. The longer you inhale and the hotter the coil  gets, the more chemicals in the juice change. Molecules merge or break down, creating  new compounds with unknown consequences.

When propylene glycol and  glycerol are heated too much, they decompose and turn into harmful  molecules. This can happen when the liquid runs out or the coil gets too hot. You  will probably notice this because your vape will taste weird or burned – if this  happens you should stop right away.

And it gets worse. When the metal coil is  heated up, it releases metal particles. Studies found aluminium, boron, calcium,  iron, copper, magnesium, zinc, lead, chromium, nickel, and manganese in the vapor – all of  which vary from really bad news to straight up toxic and can cause lung irritation,  chronic bronchitis and shortness of breath in the short term.

Nickel can  also cause cancer when breathed in. All of these mystery substances  also interact with each other in new and exciting ways. In  bad ways?

We don’t know yet. What do we know about the  health effects of vaping? What Does Vaping DO in Your Body?

The elephant in the room is that we don’t know  exactly how bad vaping is, since it has only been around for about ten years. Also, most  studies on health effects in humans focused on smokers who switched to vapes. We do know for  sure that smoking is orders of magnitudes more harmful.

Switching to vaping will reduce your  risks of disease massively. If you smoke, please switch to vaping. But these  studies also muddy the water a bit.

What if you never smoked and started to vape? In  the short term, a significant portion of vapers develop poor breathing symptoms: coughing,  extra mucus production, shortness of breath, wheezing, throat and chest pain. But the  truth is we simply don’t know what will happen in the long term.

The first larger  scale study on vaping with non-smokers only started in 2024 – it will take years  before we can say anything with confidence. We can make careful assumptions  but take them with a grain of salt. Your lungs are made from very sensitive tissue  and were never meant to deal with trillions of aerosols, chemicals and metals.

What goes into  your lungs generally stays in them forever, which is why smokers’ lungs are dark and dirty. It seems that vaping activates the immune  system, which tries to clean up the aerosols. This causes inflammation and fluid seeps  into the lungs, while the cells guarding their entry produce extra mucus you have  to cough out.

Some of them may even die. Vaping also may cause stress all over your body: it may increase your heart rate and blood  pressure, lower blood oxygen or stiffen and clog up your blood vessels. It may create  oxidative stress, which has all sorts of bad effects on your organs and may potentially  cause many different diseases over time.

Does this increase your risk of strokes, heart  diseases, lung diseases or cause cancer? Again, we don’t know. Maybe it causes damage, but  something else will kill you before vaping does.

Maybe it will make you sick.  But all we have right now is: Maybe. We are conducting one of the largest  medical experiments in history.

If you are vaping you’re a test subject. Too Much of the Wonder Drg What is new about vaping is the sheer  amount of nicotine it delivers into your system. For most people it is kind of  hard to smoke 20+ cigarettes a day because smoking is pretty harsh.

As vaping is  less aggressive and doesn’t smell bad, you can do it inside and constantly, for hours.  It is easy to go through an entire vape a day. They shower your brain in extremely high nicotine doses, which makes them extremely addictive.

For teens this may be very bad. During your  teenage years your brain is developing and your nicotine receptors are especially  active. They are directly linked with your reward system and thus, how you  feel about yourself and your life.

Nicotine may change brain development by  overstimulating the nicotine receptors. Again, the science is pretty  annoying here with loads of caveats. Nicotine in teens has been  linked to cognitive deficits, hyperactivity, reduced impulse control,  deficits in attention and cognition, and mood disorders.

But there is a chicken  and egg problem – did nicotine cause this or are people with a tendency for emotional  dysregulation just more likely to use it? There have been studies that suggest nicotine  is a gateway drug making it more likely to develop other addictions. But this has been  largely rejected.

Instead it seems people who are generally more likely to take risks, tend  to do more risky things. They are more likely to get addicted to smoking, alcohol or cannabis,  hard drugs or gambling. This doesn’t make vaping any less addictive, it just means that it is  probably not the cause of other addictions.

Where the science is pretty solid, is  that most people have a bad time when quitting nicotine. Nicotine is one of  the most addictive substances we know and comes with a wide range of really  unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms. You can be on edge and experience  intense craving for nicotine, unpleasant mood swings and anxiety. 

You can have difficulty sleeping, fatigue and headaches and trouble concentrating.  It can be harder to experience joy and to deal with stress. And it can make depression  worse.

Without nicotine your suppressed appetite comes back and since some people  compensate by eating more, they put on weight. All of this makes quitting nicotine extremely  hard. On top comes psychological addiction, that can be intense, since vaping  is extremely habit forming.

The good news is that these symptoms are  entirely reversible. It takes about 72 hours for the nicotine to leave your body  and the worst withdrawal symptoms fade out or stop entirely in a few weeks. Conclusion The problem with vaping is that it is  too good.

It tastes great, it’s pleasant and stimulating. But it also supercharges  nicotine and makes it even more addictive. Every smoker who switches from cigarettes  to vapes is a win for global health.

But this is where the benefits end. Vaping has  already hooked a significant portion of the younger generations to nicotine  and that is really bad news. It is kind of unfair to expect young people  to resist vaping by providing information about how bad it is or might be.

Scaring people  straight is a bad strategy. If you are addicted to nicotine, you use it to fight stress. And if  you stress someone out by telling them that the thing they use to fight stress is bad, they do the  thing, to fight the stress you are causing them.

Basically, humans developed a new way to make one  of the most addictive substances, that was on the decline, attractive to millions of teens by making  it taste like bubblegum. Vaping is still very new – and we still have a chance to curb this new  global addiction before it gets out of control. Making decisions that affect your health  is hard enough, but it’s impossible to base them on rational ground if you don’t  have reliable information available.

Algorithms are constantly working behind the  scenes to decide which information to show you, and alarmist headlines get amplified over  straightforward reporting. But Ground News, the sponsor of this video, can give you back  a feeling of independence. We have a personal connection to them: our founder Philipp was  immensely bored while getting chemotherapy a few years back and decided to read all  German newspapers, even the ones he hated, front to back every day.

He was shocked  to see the bias he suspected confirmed, and all the stories each side decided not to  report on. This experiment lead him to Ground News. In a nutshell, the app and website gather  the worlds news in one place so you can compare coverage, see the bigger  picture and make informed decisions.

For example, recently a study was released  claiming that in England, “1 million who never smoked started vaping. ” Ground News gives  me perspective: this was barely reported by 20 sources, a small number in comparison to  hundreds of headlines on the FDA’s first authorization of vaping products three years ago,  back when some even cited benefits for smokers. This way you can compare different perspectives in  one place, see how the story and coverage change and also reference the original story study to  make sure no nuance is lost.

You also get a sense of the bigger picture and how much weight a story  really carries to tell apart reason from racket. Go to ground. news/nutshell to give it  a try.

If you sign up through this link you’ll get 50% off the unlimited access plan, the biggest  discount of the year, either for yourself or as a gift. We think they do an important job – you only have so much control over your health, at least take control over what occupies your mind. The new 12,025 Human Era Calendar is finally here!

We think it’s the best calendar we ever made and we created it all for you. It’s not just the  vibrant illustrations, the high-quality paper or the shiny cover. It’s the fact that it represents  such an important part of our shared history.

We hope that you will use it to  continue writing history and we know that it will look great on your wall or  as a gift for a special birb in your life. As you've told us in hundreds of  reviews, comments and messages, the calendar is very special to you too!  For so many of you getting the Human Era Calendar has become a yearly tradition  and a daily source of inspiration.

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