vaping won’t give you cancer
That’s one hell of a confident statement… Backed up by exactly zero sources.
Comment on Good to see AAFES looking out for my health
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 weeks agoColes notes: smoking, is quite literally that, creating smoke that you intentionally inhale. The desired chemical (nicotine) is mixed with other smoke shit (thousands of different compounds. The shit in that smoke can give you cancer and a long list of other problems.
Vaping is basically a handheld fog machine that has nicotine added to the liquid. Usually sweetened and flavored, but not necessarily. It has the desired chemical, nicotine, as well as a short list of additives (maybe a dozen or so, depending on a few factors), and doesn’t contain any known carcinogens (so no cancer)
At the end of the day, you’re lungs should breathe the air. If you smoke or vape, that’s not as good for you as clean fresh air. However, vaping won’t give you cancer, and has a fraction of the toxins and compounds that cigarettes do.
It’s like comparing driving your car into a lamp post, or plowing through a parade with your SUV. Neither is ideal, one is definitely much worse than the other.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The onus of proof here is on the person challenging the statement made. If you can find any source that links nicotine vaping to cancer, I’m happy to discuss.
Please do not demand me to provide sources when you equally do not.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I have smoked and vaped alternatively. When I’ve vaped I have breathed as bad or worse than smoking. Vape liquids are polyethylene glycol (or some other glycol, can’t remember) and glycerine, often in 50/50 or a close ratio up or down. When vaping you are coating your lungs in oil. Probably not better than smoke. Different type of harm, but definitely very harmful. Just think about it: oil in your lungs…
Avatar_of_Self@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Your lungs can aspirate both Pg and Vg (derived from vegetables). It is misleading in my opinion to call them oil in an effort to make them sound dangerous. Pg is not petroleum and has been considered safe by the medical community since before vaping was a thing.
What makes it an oil? Viscosity? What’s the viscosity that makes a liquid an oil? You inhale water as steam but that doesn’t make water an oil.
You can call it an oil in general but just like when someone refers to electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) as electromagnetic radiation (EMR) I already know they are very likely to fear monger about it because it sounds scarier.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Both PG and VG are water soluble. If you have oil in your lungs after vaping, you might want to switch what you’re vaping.
I don’t know your situation, or what testing methods you used. I have no doubt that you’ve had an experience that supports your claims. With that being said, I have heard, both from people on the internet, and personal friends, who have switched from smoking to vaping, and almost every story is the same: after the tar is processed out of their respiratory system, they breathe a lot better after switching to vaping.
It seems logical to me that you’d need to vape for a few months before feeling the effects of quitting smoking as the tar will take at least that long to get to the point where you would feel a difference. That’s what I’ve heard from the people I’ve spoken to.
The only “vapes” I know of that have oil in them, are for marijuana. The active ingredients in marijuana are oil-soluble, so vitamin E acetate is usually used to dilute it to the desired strength. Vaping vitamin E acetate will absolutely mess up your lungs and cause permanent damage.
“Weed vapes” are generally purchased from the black markets or weed dealers, who are generally already breaking the law and don’t care about customer safety. So while stuff like vitamin E acetate is never used in the vape liquid you’d buy at your local vape shop, it can, and very likely will be in vapes that are made and distributed illegally.
dan@upvote.au 2 weeks ago
Has that been proven though? I don’t think there’s yet any sufficient long-term research to know the full risks of vaping.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
More or Less, yes, it has.
Cancer from cigarettes is largely linked to a small subset of compounds produced by the combustion of tobacco. Appropriately named as carcinogens. Those are the cancer-causing compounds that link cigarettes to cancer.
Vaping, by contrast, is propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine (PG and VG), as the base substance (which is basically the same stuff they use in fog machines, and people breathe that constantly without any directly related issues). PG/VG makes up more than 90% of the vape liquid, by volume. The remaining 10% is usually a solution of PG/VG mixed with nicotine concentrate to make the whole solution have a particular % of nicotine content, usually measured in mg per ml, and the last few percentile are flavorings.
So from a 60ml bottle, more than 55ml will be the VG/PG base fluid, 3-4 mL will be the nicotine concentrate, and the remainder will be flavoring.
Apart from the flavor ingredients: VG, PG, and nicotine, to date, have no carcinogenic characteristics and have not been linked to cancer (to the best of my knowledge). So over 95% of the volume of the liquid is known to not be cancer causing, the rest is usually food-grade flavoring.
Needless to say, food-grade flavoring is generally not carcinogenic.