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.
Make 12,025 truly special and join us in celebrating this time-honored tradition. The calendar is available exclusively on our shop. We’ve also prepared a few bundles with some of our favorite products.
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