Are you sure vaping is actually reducing potential harm? Because our national health agency isn’t[1]. As I understand it, a few brands come with a lower risk of certain tobacco induced cancers compared to smoking. Which is harm reduction, I guess, but research is suggesting that all vaping comes with greater risk to the respiratory system and heart.
Of course the real issue in evaluating the safety of e-cigerates is that we need 30-50 years of people dying from them before we really know how they compare to regular smoking.
I’ve stated this before: cigarettes will kill me with a 100% probability (I was smoking over a pack a day).
Maybe vaping will not kill me. Maybe I’ll grow a third arm in 20 years. I don’t know. But I have to play the odds; “100% certainty” vs “maybe not”, I know which one I’m going for.
Also, I’ve gone from 9mg of nicotine to 1mg in 2 years, because vaping allows me to monitor and measure exactly how much nicotine I put in and consume. With cigarettes, I only grew more addicted, never less.
I appreciate your optimism about the unknown, but there is the frightening possibility that maybe e-cigerattes will kill you more efficiently than your regular smokes.
If you’re using it as a way to stop completely, then that’s awesome, but all Danish research on the subject has led to vaping being on our “not-recommended” list for ways of helping people quit.
Except for the fact that other ways don’t work. It’s not possible to slowly reduce your nicotine intake with cigarettes. The only alternative is: stop all your smoking habits, and maybe one of these nicotine substitutes will help.
But that only adresses one part of the issue: the nicotine addiction. Smoking is a lot more complex than just the nicotine addiction. I know a lot of smokers who managed to take a break from cigarettes for a few months, but I’ve never met a vaper who went back to cigarettes.
I’m slowly rewiring my brain to not need cigarettes or vaping. I smoked for 15 years, and started during my formative years, so I know this will be a long process. Just telling me to chew gum or apply patches is a cop out for the government to clear its conscience about not really helping its population kick the smoking habit. There’s a reason the tobacco industry doesn’t care about patches and gum: it doesn’t work for the majority of smokers.
>It’s not possible to slowly reduce your nicotine intake with cigarettes. The only alternative is: stop all your smoking habits, and maybe one of these nicotine substitutes will help.
Why not? Just go from 2 packs a day to 1.9, to 1.8 etc..
That tapers the physical addiction part of it, but worsens the psychological part of the addiction, because now that you're having less, you're craving each cigarette more, and start valuing those you allow yourself to have even more. In the end, by doing this, you're suffering continuous withdrawal while worsening your psychological addiction.
It's easy to say but hard to do. Every smoker and ex-smoker I know has tried to quit multiple times, so there's a bunch of experience there. Their consensus (I don't smoke, so no firs-thand experience) seems to be that going from 2 packs a day to 0 (or a "party mode" where it's 0 most days but a pack during a festival or something) is actually easier than going from 2 packs to 1.
Habits and addiction work in ways that aren't entirely intuitive.
Increase your copper intake to increase your Cu-Zn Super Oxide Dismutase enzymes[1] which will help neutralise the free radicals. Increase Vit C to gram level (ascorbic acid mixed in milk is good), this is a base for many enzymes and will also help reduce the free radicals in the body. Damage to sperm can be reversed at this level.
The liver metabolises nicotine into an alkoid called Cotinine which is thought to be the main reason people smoke. Other studies have suggested other chemicals are also linked to addiction found in tobacco because rat studies have shown rats will prefer water sources without nicotine in, when given a choice. Tobacco also increases the level of copper in the blood stream, helping to make smokers go grey more quickly than peers. Water only fasting will reduce tobacco cravings within a few days, which then also gives the body a chance to clean itself up more quickly because White blood cell counts will remain elevated in the lungs for as much as 5 years after giving up smoking. No studies on vapours yet.
Whilst its been shown that brain pathways take 42 days to rewire themselves which is the period of time thought to remove the addiction from the brain, the liver is more involved in the brain and addiction pathways than the medical profession will care to admit. Another easy way to give up smoking is consuming raw Ox liver. The enzymes in the liver like catalase, ceruloplasmin and others will remove the stress and desire to smoke plus will give you an immediate energy boost. The risk of consuming raw ox liver periodically throughout the day is from parasites, but the raw liver makes you feel very good and alive if you ever need a pick me up.
i would argue that on a long enough timescale, anything will 100% kill you. not trying to be cheeky, more just trying to say that that sort of argument only really works for people who are active antismokers; most smokers (i think, from personal experience) are very aware of the danger of smoking, but feel that it offsets some condition of reality that makes it more tolerable even compared to the reduced lifetime. that's just my perspective though
Yes, you described addiction, which is a local optimum compared to being a little less addicted, because addiction traps your brain. Breaking addiction is better buy not adjacent.
The murder victim rate of smokers is non zero, the road accident fatality rate of smokers is non zero.
And on the other side the lung cancer rate of non smokers is non zero.
So you can't really say ahead of time you will even die of a smoking associated cause, and even if you did, you can't definitively state that it was caused by the smoking.
> Are you sure vaping is actually reducing potential harm?
Yep. I quit smoking via 3 years of vaping and tapering down on nicotine. I've referred and seen no less than a half-dozen people I know do the same - some of the hardest smokers i've known (including my own fathers 40 year+ pack a day habit)
If anybody asks i'll always turn people onto vaping - even if they don't ask i'll push them towards it, nothing has gotten even close to working like vaping has a a quit mechanism
I really strongly believe that this is an area where regulations lag real-world experience and there are a ton of vested interests in preserving the existing regimes of either smoke tobacco or nothing at all
Anecdotal counterpoint: I was a 1-2 pack a day smoker for ten years. If I'd picked up vaping I'd probably still be smoking. I tried early e-cigarettes and didn't care for them because while I got the nicotine the actual practice wasn't as pleasant. But if that aspect of "this is fine for me" was present I may not have asserted my desire to stop so strongly. I had a hard time quitting until I went all-in with no surrogates.
A resolute mind and a week in bed/at home was what did it. From 100% -> 0%. I've had maybe 2 cigarettes since that time and they were enough to convince me I don't want the habit back. Because of whatever recovery processes were happening with my lungs/esophagus I was all kinds of sick for that week. Staying home let me be as gross as I needed to be to get past the worst of it. And really, the first 3-4 days are the worst of the physical symptoms. Once you make it to a week it gets easier, two weeks even moreso. Years out and it's hard to believe I kept it up for so long. I'm really glad I didn't start vaping.
Congratulations on quitting! Do you feel you could explain the difference vaping made for tapering down, as opposed to trying to smoke fewer and fewer cigarettes?
As a person who smokes on and off, part of it is that you can continue your physical habit (take a break, hold something in your hand, breathe in warm air with a specific taste etc) but you can still drop the nicotine.
If you were to try and cut down on cigs you can only do it by reducing the number of smoking sessions, whereas with a vaporiser you can keep your sessions static and just reduce the addictive chemical compound.
In essence it's easier to reduce your nicotine addiction if you can continue to comfort yourself with the physical habit part of the addiction
I'm someone who used to crack up if he hadn't had a cigarette in 3 hours. Replacing cigarette with vape isn't some natural effort, but it is far from hard to do either. The nervous compulsion to have a cigarette is satisfied by a vape, after which, for reasons I simply do not understand, it becomes easier and easier to just not pick up the vape over time.
I don't know at what point it happened, but I can easily go a full day and 'forget to' vape. Smoking was never like that
It's because of the other stuff in the tobacco plant. There's a whole host of addictive things that aren't nicotine in there.
If you can switch from many addictive things to just nicotine, then you can get off the nicotine alone pretty easily. It only takes about 3 days for cravings to stop.
Smoking tobacco is remarkably harmful. It would be somewhat surprising if vaping could be anywhere near as harmful.
Your link (in translation) makes some good points:
E-Cigarettes are not a medicine and are not regulated as such and so might be lower quality; there's a lot of variation in types of product and ingredients used; liquid refill ratio may be unsuitable for one machine even though it's recommended for another;
> The National Board of Health recommends not using e-cigarettes
> There is considerable uncertainty about the potential health consequences of e-cigarettes both with and without nicotine, especially in the long term. Therefore, the National Board of Health does not recommend using e-cigarettes. This is especially true for pregnant women, nursing mothers, children and adolescents.
I don't think this link is saying that vaping does not reduce harm. I think it's using the precautionary principle to say we don't know what the harms are yet, and some harms are emerging.
I do think they're making reasonable points, especially if they're providing nicotine replacement as part of smoking cessation services that are freely available.
Other countries have health services that have come to different conclusions. In the UK Public Health England say that vaping is less harmful than smoking and that it's ok for smokers to switch to vaping, but that we really don't want anyone who doesn't smoke to start vaping.
Of course the real issue in evaluating the safety of e-cigerates is that we need 30-50 years of people dying from them before we really know how they compare to regular smoking.
[1] https://www.sst.dk/da/sundhed-og-livsstil/tobak/andre-tobaks...