# Article on Health 24



## Jan (28/9/16)

http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/S...rings-boost-toxicity-of-e-cigarettes-20160923


----------



## Gizmo (28/9/16)

Typical news24 never posts on positive study on ecigs..


----------



## SmokeyJoe (28/9/16)

Im really getting pissed off about all the negative news about vaping, when are they going to report on how many lives it saves, mine included


----------



## incredible_hullk (28/9/16)

Jan said:


> http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/S...rings-boost-toxicity-of-e-cigarettes-20160923



News24 and their capitalist tenancies...maybe kickbacks from BAT for them


----------



## Cespian (28/9/16)

Like what the actual... yes, we know it is not entirely safe to vape. I mean obviously. But as a tobacco smoking alternative, these "scientists" need to always compare it to a cigarette to make the study valid... thats how any analytics works. No one can complete a study without having a *control group*. The sad part is that they probably did but these marketing folk are fond of taking studies out of context.

Reactions: Agree 2


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

Cespian said:


> But as a tobacco smoking alternative, these "scientists" need to always compare it to a cigarette to make the study valid...



They did, though:



> Despite the toxicity of e-cigarette vapours, Goniewicz added that tobacco cigarettes are even more toxic.
> 
> "In our study, we also exposed cells to tobacco smoke and found that tobacco smoke was much more toxic than e-cigarettes," he said.



Incidentally, this is the study that we saw in the BBC Horizon documentary. If you recall, there was a bloke who was passing vapour over cells in Petrie dishes and testing how many cells died. He talked about testing menthol and other flavours, and noted that menthol was killing much more cells than the other flavours. But even in that documentary, he also showed that tobacco smoke was killing many more cells than the menthol. 

If you recall further, the scientist in question was a balding bloke with a strange high-pitched voice and foreign accent. That is Maciej Goniewicz, the author of this study. He is a Polish researcher who is doing tons of work on vaping. Here is one study he's done. The key excerpt:



> “To our knowledge, this is the first study with smokers to demonstrate that substituting tobacco cigarettes with electronic cigarettes may reduce exposure to numerous toxicants and carcinogens present in tobacco cigarettes,” says lead author Maciej Goniewicz, PhD, PharmD, Assistant Professor of Oncology in the Department of Health Behavior at Roswell Park. “This study suggests that smokers who completely switch to e-cigarettes and stop smoking tobacco cigarettes may significantly reduce their exposure to many cancer-causing chemicals.”



Here is another study authored by Goniewicz. Key excerpt:



> *Results*
> We found that the e-cigarette vapors contained some toxic substances. The levels of the toxicants were 9 to 450 times lower than in cigarette smoke and were, in many cases, comparable to trace amounts found in the reference product.
> 
> *Conclusions*
> Our findings are consistent with the idea that substituting tobacco cigarettes with electronic cigarettes may substantially reduce exposure to selected tobacco-specific toxicants. E-cigarettes as a harm reduction strategy among smokers unwilling to quit warrants further study.



So he's hardly on some anti-vaping crusade. Quite the contrary, he is one of the most pro-vaping voices in medical research. If he reckons there are potential problems with flavourants used in vaping, I'd be inclined to take it seriously. Although I don't think he's saying that. The article is making his conclusions sound worse than they are. But that is a common trend in the media. Sensational headlines generate more clicks.

Reactions: Like 6 | Agree 1 | Winner 1


----------



## rogue zombie (28/9/16)

Oh great... I can already hear all the bloody lectures I am going to get.

Its pretty frikken sad that SA has, basically, one major online news outlet. And everyone reads them, and everyone will form opinions based on the bloody News24 group. And News24 are not only sensationalist, but also behind.

I STILL hear about water on the lungs.

Reactions: Funny 1


----------



## Huffapuff (28/9/16)

RichJB said:


> The article is making his conclusions sound worse than they are. But that is a common trend in the media. Sensational headlines generate more clicks.



Sadly this is so often the case nowadays - the truth or benefits are overlooked in order to jump on the current bandwagon of demonizing vaping. No integrity, no researching the subject, no balanced articles - just regurgitate whatever the common message that happens to be popular at the moment.


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

I don't think it's a vaping thing specifically, just a general science media thing. In another thread, I posted a John Oliver video in which he talks about "scientific studies" and the problems with them. He talked about the recent studies on coffee which are split between hazardous and beneficial findings. He also noted that there are several foodstuffs which have been "scientifically proven" to both cause and prevent cancer. And then he also talked about a Time article which said scientists think that smelling farts could cure cancer - when the study had nothing to do with either farts or cancer. It's just how the world is.

Reactions: Agree 1


----------



## rogue zombie (28/9/16)

RichJB said:


> I don't think it's a vaping thing specifically, just a general science media thing. In another thread, I posted a John Oliver video in which he talks about "scientific studies" and the problems with them. He talked about the recent studies on coffee which are split between hazardous and beneficial findings. He also noted that there are several foodstuffs which have been "scientifically proven" to both cause and prevent cancer. And then he also talked about a Time article which said scientists think that smelling farts could cure cancer - when the study had nothing to do with either farts or cancer. It's just how the world is.



Another problem of "modern man" is we have come to mostly only read headlines, and rarely finish an actual article.

I can't remember the site, but a friend sent me a link headlining something to the effect of finding 'Cannabis is from another planet'. But then the article was actually about clickbait - people only reading the headlines and not the article.


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

Yes, media clickbait is a big problem. But science research also has problems. In the Oliver clip, scientists talked about the need to come up with eye-catching results in order to secure tenure and funding, and then also the lack of willingness to perform replication studies. As they said, there is no Nobel prize for fact-checking, and no credit to be had for being the second scientist to prove/discover something.

Then there are also inherent problems with p-hacking and other methodologies, which essentially guarantee that many findings will not be valid. This is a rather geeky clip that outlines the problems:

Reactions: Like 1 | Informative 1


----------



## rogue zombie (28/9/16)

RichJB said:


> Yes, media clickbait is a big problem. But science research also has problems. In the Oliver clip, scientists talked about the need to come up with eye-catching results in order to secure tenure and funding, and then also the lack of willingness to perform replication studies. As they said, there is no Nobel prize for fact-checking, and no credit to be had for being the second scientist to prove/discover something.
> 
> Then there are also inherent problems with p-hacking and other methodologies, which essentially guarantee that many findings will not be valid. This is a rather geeky clip that outlines the problems:




Interesting. And a little disturbing.

Reactions: Agree 1


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

Here is an article with Maciej on this issue of vaping flavours and the research he's doing:



Sorry, this one is probably clearer and better:



This is a bit of a concern for me. As I say, Maciej is very pro-vaping generally. Now he says that vaping at higher wattages isn't good and that some flavours are quite bad. He cites strawberry in the clip above. The research upon which the Royal College based their estimate of "95% less harmful than smoking" is several years old and is therefore likely to have been based on the typical vaping gear and style of the time: lower wattage devices consuming only a few ml of juice per day. Is the transition to higher wattages and much higher juice consumption going to affect that? I think vaping will still come out way ahead of smoking but it is something we all need to be aware of.


----------



## Silver (28/9/16)

RichJB said:


> They did, though:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Thanks for sharing this @RichJB 

On the topic of certain flavours being worse for you than others - I am not happy about the study regarding menthol 

I did read it before but chose to ignore it. 
So be it!


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

You're still a lot better off with menthol than with any tobacco cig, @Silver. I remember Maciej citing menthol in the BBC Horizon programme. In the first clip I posted he seems to be talking about cherry and then strawberry in the second clip. So there could be several that have harmful effects. However, we now need to delve deeper:
1) What flavours exactly was he testing? Because most vaping research seems to focus mostly on cigalikes or eGo type devices, I'm guessing that these are probably cigalike flavours offered by big tobacco. Are they using the same flavours that vape juice manufacturers use? Are they adding other stuff?
2) Are some flavours inherently more hazardous than others, or could it differ by brand? Would FA's Strawberry be the same as TFA Strawberry Ripe and Capella Sweet Strawberry? Is it the essence/basics of the flavour that is causing the problem or might be it some other additive that companies are putting in?
3) He talks about strawberry as being "highly toxic" but what is the scale? Is it highly toxic compared to other vaping flavours, tobacco, food flavours, PG, VG, what? Some sort of reference point is needed.

Vaping research is in its infancy and I'm sure that, over time, we will eventually get detailed breakdowns of every single flavour profile from every single manufacturer. We have already started the process and know that diacetyl/acetoin/acetyl propionyl present a limited risk, so companies market DX or v2 flavours without diketones for those who aren't willing to take that risk. Personally, it doesn't bother me, I'll use a v1 flavour if it's available, I'm not freaked out by diacetyl. But if we can get breakdowns of every hazardous substance and their relative risk, and flavour companies can then make safer alternatives, it allows us to make informed choices.

Reactions: Agree 1 | Thanks 1


----------



## Silver (28/9/16)

Thanks @RichJB 

Well all I can say is they had better not find out that Strawberry Menthol is bad 

Because then I will be very upset!!!

Reactions: Funny 1


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

Well, I am not going to give up my strawberry juices. Not after I've just mixed up Mustard Milk, Strawberry Cheesecake and Enyawreklaw's Strawberry Ice Cream in a Sugar Cone thingy. Nor am I about to give up menthol either. Not until I get some idea about the scale of the risk involved.

I've been reading some old Agatha Christie whodunit novels recently and she loves nicotine poisoning as a cause of death and means of murder. I find it very frustrating that we are never told if the nic was 36mg or 100mg, nor even whether it was PG or VG nic. You know you're a confirmed vaper when these details make all the difference.

Reactions: Like 1 | Winner 1


----------



## Feliks Karp (28/9/16)

When I started vaping I was one of those people who get all excited about diketones, then you read that the one guy outside of that infamous factory who got "popcorn lung" ate several bags of microwave popcorn for over a decade, so he was basically huffing it non-stop, and with all that fear generated over an extreme case, what have they replaced the compounds with? I read an article somewhere that FA said they were interested in replacing them with butyric acid a food additive also used for making smooth-sweet textures, a compound found in fermented dairy and human vomit.

Absolute nonsense research has been common place for a long time, the last few years have seen a swell in support for anti-vaccine sentiment which was based off of research done by Andrew Wakefield in *1998* which only started to raise suspicions in *2004* and then completely debunked as fraudulent only in *2011*. 

Forgive me, but I haven't slept in two days so I can't recall all the details but there was another researcher about four weeks ago who also made some claim about heart tissue contraction/stiffness from vaping, then when people dug in deeper she admitted that thirty minutes of vaping produced the same stiffness as five minutes of smoking, it then came to light that the stiffness was well documented as being nicotine related and even similar to the stiffness produced by caffeine intake. So basically she relabeled already established data that vaping exposes you to a 1 : 6 ratio of nicotine exposure compared to cigarettes.

Everyone is playing their own game in order to stay relevant. In fact I start switching off when one of these guys starts talking about volts and wattages, because to me volume and heat are the correct units to look at, your current parameters obviously do effect volume and heat, but a guy who runs a 0.1 coil at 120 watts is probably not getting as much heat as some one running a 0.5 at 120 watts. 

I think what we need to accept is that vaping is never going to be healthy just healthy in relation to smoking, you are heating up chemicals and inhaling them, your body was never really built for that, and if even if you replaced each cigarette you had with a tomato (which is essentially a healthy food item) eating say twenty tomatoes a day would probably be adverse. In another thread I even cited water intoxication which despite what people think is relatively easy to experience not just because of water intake but lack of electrolytes. Just use your discretion on how much to do something and also try not get mad at the media because there is probably never going to be a completely pro-vaping article.

Reactions: Like 2 | Agree 3


----------



## DarkSide (28/9/16)

Thanks for sharing this @RichJB
_"and that some flavours are quite bad. He cites strawberry in the clip above"_
Until the day arrives when they can scientifically prove that MY strawberry and custard "addiction" is harmful, or I turn bright pink/red from my strawberry juice followed by a glowing yellow hue from my custard juices, I will continue to vape away whilst smacking my lips in sheer cloudy bliss, quite partial to menthol as well, going to add this to the mix with a dash of coconut, I will be the first to post a picture when I transform into a glowing muti-colour alien that does not have coughing fits, can breathe and does not smell of smoke....

Reactions: Like 1


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

Yes, I'd like to know how Maciej quantifies "highly toxic". He is not an alarmist or anti-vaping and he hasn't been taken out of context, those were his exact words in the video clip. But it needs to be quantified with more than a descriptor or even some raw figures. In another thread, Caveman linked a video in which it was claimed that polonium (among others) in cigarette smoke makes a smoker's lungs "the most radioactive place on Earth". Then I read a prominent cancer researcher's finding that polonium is at such low levels that it's unlikely to induce cancer in smokers. So which of the two is it? One needs to weigh up both sides of the story.

We had the same thing with diacetyl. At first we heard it can be bad for your lungs. Then Dr Siegel said it's far worse in cig smoke and you don't ever hear of smokers being diagnosed with popcorn lung so we shouldn't worry. Then Dr Farsalinos tossed in his .02 that smokers DO get popcorn lung effects but, because it's not the dominant condition, it gets diagnosed secondary to the primary diagnosis of lung cancer or emphysema. Ultimately it has led to us DIYers being given the choice of whether we want to use diketone-free flavourings or not. I think that is the best compromise.

I suspect we're going to hear a lot more about flavourings. Maciej was asked in the first clip I linked whether the list of red flag flavours is going to grow and he predicts that it will. He's only just started in this field, there is much more work to do. So strawberry might be not much worse than many other flavour profiles - and possibly better than some. As long as we are given some indication of the relative risks of each flavour compared to a control group, we can then decide whether it's a risk we want to take or not. Either way, it's info that I'd rather have than not have. It doesn't mean I'll change my vaping habits, I haven't gone out of my way to avoid diketones thus far. But then it's a choice based on knowledge and risk assessment rather than blind ignorance. It will also give flavour manufacturers the info to decide whether to offer lower-risk alternatives. I think that's as good as we are going to get.

Reactions: Like 1 | Winner 1


----------



## Jan (28/9/16)

I think one of the biggest challenges when one is doing research and comparisons between vaping vs smoking is that a cigarette is pretty much a cigarette, but to what do you compare it? an ego aio with a 0.6ohm coil or a smok tfv 8?

It s is kind of pointless if volume for volume vaping is 100x safer than smoking but we inhale 100x more vapour than smoke. You see where I am going with this


----------



## Trashcanman3284 (28/9/16)

Jan said:


> I think one of the biggest challenges when one is doing research and comparisons between vaping vs smoking is that a cigarette is pretty much a cigarette, but to what do you compare it? an ego aio with a 0.6ohm coil or a smok tfv 8?
> 
> It s is kind of pointless if volume for volume vaping is 100x safer than smoking but we inhale 100x more vapour than smoke. You see where I am going with this



Had pretty much the same discussion with my doctor this week. I asked him his opinion on vaping pretty much knowing the answer but wanted to see if he had put effort into finding out for himself before shooting it down. The expected answer of there being no long term studies came up but he then added that the even if its less harmful, how much more vapour do you inhale compared to the amount of cigarettes you smoked? That took me back a bit as I had not considered that before. For me personally, I definitely vape more frequently than what I smoked and of course the volume of what is being inhaled is more. Whether the frequency of my vaping offsets the benefit of not smoking is unknown to me. Perhaps someone here has the answer?

Reactions: Like 1


----------



## RichJB (28/9/16)

@Jan, this is my major concern too. When all of the pro-vaping researchers and bodies - Drs Farsalinos, Siegel and Goniewicz, Public Health England, the Royal College - picture 'vaping', I think they picture a person puffing tiny clouds of about 1-3ml per day on a long, slim cigalike or eGo-style device, running at low wattages with probably a small MTL tank at most. We saw this in the BBC Horizon doccie too. The host got a VTC Mini with a MTL tank and, judging by his clouds, he was probably running about 20W max. It's a cool vape with very low juice consumption.

In their report, the Royal College said they wanted to see more innovation in vaping. Of course, the vaping industry leapt on that with "yeah, regulation is bad, we must be free to innovate our products!" When the Royal College talks about innovation, I guess they are talking about devices that burn cleaner, use less nicotine, use less juice, run at lower temps, etc. When Smok et al talk of innovation, they mean getting vapers to transition from 75W to 200W to 300W mods, putting more and more batteries into mods, putting more and more coils into stock coil heads, raising power output and temps across the board, and driving juice consumption to exorbitant new highs.

The supposed synergy between the Royal College and the vaping community is based on a misperception imo. Sure, they are united by a loathing of big tobacco. Just as the DA and EFF are united by opposition to the ANC. But once we get beyond that mutual 'enemy', there is little common ground. If the Royal College knew the direction that the vaping industry was taking with "innovation", I think the honeymoon would be over very quickly. People chucking 60ml worth of clouds per day of scorching hot vape on 300W mods is not what the Royal College had in mind.

I think the vast majority of vaping research until now has been done on Twisp-like devices. To illustrate, when Dr Siegel put together his rebuttal of the diacetyl claims, he assumed an average daily intake of 1ml of juice per day. That might be fairly representative of the Twisp-using mainstream. It certainly is not representative of 'vaping' as we know it. 

I would assume that vaping is much like smoking in that increasing your consumption of the product increases the concomitant health risks. If you smoke 50 a day, that is far worse than smoking 10 a day. So I think it's reasonable to conclude that vaping 50ml a day is a lot worse than the daily average of 1-2ml that the medical researchers seem to take for granted. What effect will this greater consumption have on their results? 

There is also inevitable lag in research. It takes probably a year to conduct a proper study. So results that are released now probably did their testing a year ago. What sort of gear was available back then? 200W mods? Octuple-coil heads? Tanks that guzzle 50ml of juice a day? I don't think so. A year ago, the 40W iStick was cutting edge technology. If Dr Farsalinos started testing 60ml daily consumption of a TFV8 on a Koopor Primus now, we'd only know the results this time next year.

So we have vapers chucking monster clouds and thinking "it's OK, the Royal College says it's 95% safer than smoking". We don't know that. At best, we can say that the Royal College thinks that Twisping is 95% safer than smoking. The jury is still out on cloud-chucking. Maybe I'm over-reacting, maybe the results of dramatically higher juice consumption won't translate into substantially higher health risks. Still, it is information that I would rather have than not have.

Reactions: Like 2


----------



## Silver (28/9/16)

Trashcanman3284 said:


> Had pretty much the same discussion with my doctor this week. I asked him his opinion on vaping pretty much knowing the answer but wanted to see if he had put effort into finding out for himself before shooting it down. The expected answer of there being no long term studies came up but he then added that the even if its less harmful, how much more vapour do you inhale compared to the amount of cigarettes you smoked? That took me back a bit as I had not considered that before. For me personally, I definitely vape more frequently than what I smoked and of course the volume of what is being inhaled is more. Whether the frequency of my vaping offsets the benefit of not smoking is unknown to me. Perhaps someone here has the answer?



Good point @Trashcanman3284
I too take many more puffs vaping than i did smoking. If one estimates that an analog was about 20 puffs, then i was on about 400 per day.
I probably do about 10 puffs every 10 minutes so about 60 an hour. So thats around 1000 puffs in a 16 hour day while awake

However

My feeling is that the volume of vapour is not the thing which makes its worse. I think the lack of toxins (as found in cigarettes) means that irrespective of the volume vaped it will be considerably less harmful. My feeling is that the volume of vapour is not cumulative regarding the impact of the toxicity when compared to smoking.

Its like hitting your finger with a 1 pound hammer 100 times is not as sore as hitting it once with a 100 pound hammer.

But thats just my feeling and opinion at this point

Reactions: Like 3


----------



## Trashcanman3284 (29/9/16)

Silver said:


> Good point @Trashcanman3284
> I too take many more puffs vaping than i did smoking. If one estimates that an analog was about 20 puffs, then i was on about 400 per day.
> I probably do about 10 puffs every 10 minutes so about 60 an hour. So thats around 1000 puffs in a 16 hour day while awake
> 
> ...



I hear you, and I agree. Purely going on my own experience here, making the switch has had several health improvements for me; sinus issues I've had for many a year dissapeared, headaches dissapeared, I sleep better and apparently I don't snore anymore. So going on what my body tells me, what I am inhaling now is seemingly much less toxic than what I had been inhaling for 15+ years prior. But then again, using the way I physically feel does not lesson the possible toxic effect vaping or certain flavours could have. Measuring 15+ years of smoking against the effects of 5 months of vaping is of course a bit silly as well. I'll post here again in 15 years time with an update

Reactions: Like 1 | Winner 1


----------



## Silver (29/9/16)

Trashcanman3284 said:


> I hear you, and I agree. Purely going on my own experience here, making the switch has had several health improvements for me; sinus issues I've had for many a year dissapeared, headaches dissapeared, I sleep better and apparently I don't snore anymore. So going on what my body tells me, what I am inhaling now is seemingly much less toxic than what I had been inhaling for 15+ years prior. But then again, using the way I physically feel does not lesson the possible toxic effect vaping or certain flavours could have. Measuring 15+ years of smoking against the effects of 5 months of vaping is of course a bit silly as well. I'll post here again in 15 years time with an update



Congrats @Trashcanman3284 - those are great benefits to be chalking up after just 5 months!
Long may it continue

Reactions: Thanks 1


----------



## Huffapuff (29/9/16)

While this video is by no means scientific, I do feel that it illustrates a point:

Reactions: Like 2


----------



## Silver (29/9/16)

Last part of that video was great 
Thanks for sharing @Huffapuff 

Reminds me of the exhaling of cigarette smoke versus vapour on the tissue video where you see all the gunk and tar from the cigarette smoke but the tissue is clean after the vapour


----------

