Today vaping is trending all around this world, and what’s more vaping has even created its own culture and attitude in some areas. However, under the influence of this unstoppable trend, some people can't help but start thinking about a problem which is ---- Does vaping have any side effects?
As a matter of fact, vaping as a fashionable trend was not the original intention for the development of e-cigarettes. The original intention for vape products was to replace the traditional cigarette to improve the public health. This idea was first raised by Hon Lik, the inventor of e-cigarettes who works as a Chinese medical physician in Beijing, China.
There is a growing body of research that shows vaping does have a positive effect on smoking cessation and the reduction of harmful substances in the body. The harmful substances in cigarettes, such as tar and carbon monoxide, are not present when vaping. Nevertheless, people’s concerns regarding vaping side effects still remain, as they might suffer some symptoms from time to time, including dry mouth, sore throat, nicotine addiction, vaper’s cough, vapers tongue and popcorn lung.
-Dry Mouth
Dry mouth is the most common side effect among vapers. The cause is mainly due to the over intake of PG (Propylene Glycol) VG (Vegetable Glycerin), which are the basic ingredients of e-juice. In more detail, PG is more serious than VG in causing dry mouth, but for those who vape pure VG of e-juice, they are also occasionally troubled by dry mouth.
To relieve dry mouth symptoms caused by inhaling excessive PG or VG, the fastest way is to use some oral hydration products such as Biotene. Or you can just drink more water than you used to do. In general, the symptom of dry mouth will be relieved soon.
-Sore Throat
Pain and itching of the throat may be caused by several factors or their combined effects. Excessive intake of PG, stimulate the taste of the throat, or even the coil material within the atomizer can all bring great discomfort to your throat.
To get rid of the discomforts caused by vaping to our throat, the first thing you need to do is to figure out the specific reasons to take appropriate follow-up actions. If the discomfort was caused by the e-juice, then you can consider switching an e-juice with a higher percentage of VG, softer taste or less nicotine concentration. But if the cause was related to the coil material as nickel can be another reason to stimulate our throat, then a replacement of coil should be taken into consideration.
-Nicotine Addiction
The first thing to note is that vaping does not eliminate nicotine intake. Conversely, vaping sometimes increases the absorption of nicotine, which tends to vary depending on the type of e-juice used.
The original intention of using nicotine in e-cigarettes is to help people who smoke traditional cigarettes to better adapt to the entire smoking cessation process as the harmful components of traditional cigarettes are far more than nicotine. That’s why vaping can be understood as a selective helping way for smokers to get rid of harmful substances.
Therefore, if you feel more and more dependent on vaping, or feel uncomfortable by inhaling the e-juice with high-content nicotine, you need to consider changing your e-juice with a lower level of nicotine concentration or converted to nicotine-free e-juice products.
-Vaper’s Cough
Vapers cough is a common symptom for people who are just beginning to vape as the vapor we inhale into our lungs can cause irritation. A study confirms that 57% of vapers experienced coughing when they first start vaping, but then 93% of them got rid of coughing within the short term.
The stimulating substance PG is the main cause of coughing during vaping. In addition to irritating substances, many other reasons can also cause us to cough, including the techniques we adopted when vaping, the ciliary regeneration in our respiratory, the Nicotine intake and the vaping device we used.
Also, different from traditional tobacco, most of the e-juice products we vape do not contain the anesthetic substances which can relieve lung irritation, that’s why we may suffer a more severe cough response than smoking in the early stages of vaping.
-Vapers Tongue
For those who vape regularly, they may suffer from vapers tongue. The vapers tongue is an unwarranted symptom of tongue losing its ability to taste, the patients feel that their tongue is covered with an unknown substance and it prevents their tongue from contacting with taste. Vapers tongue is mainly caused by three reasons, including lack of oral saliva, olfactory fatigue, and smoking.
Now we are talking about the PG issue again. Just like we mentioned before, PG within the e-juice we inhale can lead to oral dehydration, and the lack of oral saliva can make the taste buds on the tongue not fully moisturized so that the ability to taste is negatively affected.
Our olfactory sense almost takes 70% of the credit on flavor identification while our tongue can only tell the difference among 5 basic flavors (sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami). The smell from excessive vaping can cause our sense of olfactory to feel tired which leads to a situation of further smelling blocked, so when our olfactory sense is fatigued, we can barely identify nothing of flavor.
Also, smoking is another serious reason you should take into consideration. If you were an ex-smoker or still smoke from time to time, you should realize that smoking can harm our oral function to weaken our ability to taste .
-Popcorn Lung
Popcorn lung is a common name for bronchiolitis obliterans. The reason why it is called popcorn lung is that the disease was discovered firstly in the workers who worked in a popcorn factory in Missouri. Popcorn lung can be caused by a chemical called diacetyl, which is found widely in alcoholic drinks and cultured milk products. Also, diacetyl was considered as a food-grade chemical substance to enhance the flavor of our food such as popcorn.
In 2014, a report by chemist Kurt Kistler and his colleagues was released to point out that most of the sweet flavor e-juice contains diacetyl, which significantly deepens people’s fear of vaping.
We can understand the reasonable deducing of association between vaping and popcorn lung as many brands of e-juice contain diacetyl. However, so far, there has not been a case report of popcorn lung caused by vaping. Compared with vaping, the amount of diacetyl absorbed by smoking traditional tobacco can exceed 100 times that of vaping we still haven’t received any related report of the connection between smoking and popcorn lung.
If you are still concerned about the diacetyl intake, you can change your e-juice to diacetyl free ones. If you lived in the UK or European Union area, then you don’t need to worry about this issue as the e-juice produced locally is not allow to add diacetyl.
The vaping side effects are often due to excessive intake of nicotine or PG, which can be cured by replacing the e-juice. For those reasons that are caused by the behavior of vaping itself, this tends to be related to the physical condition of different people as some people may suffer a terrible physical reaction of vaping, then these people should not keep going with vaping.
All in all, it is worth noting that vaping is not healthy behavior for the public. Vaping is just a way we can alternative smoking for a better health condition.
Source from:
- https://www.nhs.uk/smokefree/help-and-advice/e-cigarettes#
- https://vaping360.com/health/side-effects-of-vaping/#dry-mouth-from-vaping
- https://vaping360.com/health/popcorn-lung-diacetyl/
- https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-does-vaping-hurt-my-throat-4177854
- https://www.ecigarettedirect.co.uk/ashtray-blog/2015/07/vape-e-cig-cough.html
- https://academic.oup.com/ntr/article-abstract/17/2/168/2858003
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