Even if you’ve never smoked a cigarette in your life and believe that it is a filthy habit that has no right to exist in the same world with you, you’ve probably heard about vaping. However, do you know what exactly vaping is — how it works and how it is different from traditional smoking? If you are a bit fuzzy on the details and want to know more, read on.
People have been consuming tobacco for thousands of years by various methods – via chewing, sniffing, smoking, and who knows how else. Thus, it is hardly surprising that modern technological developments and recently discovered adverse health effects of tobacco led to the invention of a new way of consuming it – or rather, of consuming nicotine, the ingredient that gives tobacco the kick it has.
Vaping (short for “vaporing”) means inhaling the aerosol (commonly referred to as “vapor”) of nicotine-containing liquid that is heated and vaporized by means of special devices usually called electronic cigarettes (e-cigs) or vaporizers.
The main difference of vaping as opposed to traditional smoking is that it doesn’t involve the process of burning tobacco leaves. Nicotine is what makes inhaling tobacco fumes pleasurable, but it is far from being the only (and even primary) component of tobacco. According to the members of vaping community, these additional ingredients are responsible for most of the harm caused by smoking. As a result, vaping circumvents them by eliminating tobacco altogether.
Opponents of vaping often claim that there is not enough research concerning possible health hazards of this new practice, and that nobody actually knows what manufacturers put into their so-called “vaping juices.” In fact, this is rather far from truth – components of e-juices are more or less the same across all manufacturers and consist of elements that don’t pose health hazards (well, except for nicotine, but we will get to this later): propylene glycol, used in asthma inhalers, food-grade flavorings, and similar mundane ingredients.
As for nicotine, most manufacturers produce juices containing wildly varying quantities of it: from an insane 36 milligrams per milliliters to none at all. That’s right, at least part of vaping community don’t use any nicotine, believing that flavors provided by juices are by far the most important part of the process. It is also worth mentioning that some juice manufacturers produce only nicotine-free juices.
Which is, by the way, another major difference vaping has from smoking. Despite the abundance of differently flavored tobaccos, their smell and taste in most cases boils down to one and the same, which is, unsurprisingly, still tobacco. Vaping juices, however, use flavorless and odorless substances as their basis, which gives manufacturers a lot more freedom: they are more or less free to create juices that will smell of anything one can imagine.
And finally – although vaping has been in existence for far too short a time to make any long-lasting conclusions (vaporizers entered global market only about ten years ago), there is some evidence that it may serve as a first step for those who want to quit smoking and failed to do it in more traditional ways. In the very least, it provides a safer and more socially acceptable alternative to smoking that can be used by those who find quitting altogether far too difficult.
The vaping industry has grown explosively over the last decade, and today you can find all kinds of e-cigs and e-juices: from cheap devices of dubious quality imitating “analog” cigarettes (produces by tobacco companies, interestingly enough), to complex gadgets allowing you to regulate the power level and vapor intensity – and it seems that the practice has a bright future ahead of it.
Featured photo credit: Vaping 2/JC Kars via flickr.com
The post New Phenomenon: What Is Vaping? appeared first on Lifehack.
from Lifehack http://ift.tt/1LKKDEz
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário