While in the UK, the Royal College of Physicians and Public Health England wholeheartedly endorse vaping and actively refute many of the absurd claims made in opposition of e-cigs, the CDC’s prohibitionist, alarmist mindset continues unabated.
Nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) isn’t as benign as Big Pharma wants you to believe. They may have suckered politicians, doctors and scientists into supporting their trade in an addictive drug, but with my powers of cherry-picking, misrepresentation and lies of omission, I can reveal the truth: NRT is a serious threat to public health.
If you want a constant stream of junk science on a topic, one thing you’ll need is some researchers willing to crank out a shoddy paper in support of your cause, ideally without putting too much work into it. And the University of North Carolina's Rebecca Williams has mastered the art.
If you believe the stuff you hear about vaping in the media or from many of those in public health and tobacco control, you’d think that e-cigarettes were going to be a bad thing for the population. But a new analysis of UK data has revealed that e-cigarettes have led to an additional 16,000 to 22,000 smokers quitting in 2014 alone.
If there was one rule for conducting scientific studies on a topic, it would be to make sure you understand it first. But with e-cigarettes, that is not what happens. All too frequently, vaping researchers know almost nothing about vaping, and the result is invariably a study that ends up discouraging smokers from making the switch. Here are some of the worst offenders.
For those intent on claiming that e-cigs are a gateway to conventional cigarettes, the new Monitoring the Future study has a pretty devastating result: it turns out, most teen vapers don’t even use nicotine.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that a recent study found that teenagers are using e-cigarettes to vape pot. The headline finding is that almost one in five teens who’d tried vaping e-liquid had also tried vaping marijuana, but – as always – such an opportunity couldn’t be allowed to pass by without attempting to blame e-cigarettes for what happened. So, are e-cigarettes a gateway to marijuana now?
Just when you thought the whole formaldehyde issue had been abused enough, utterly debunked by subsequent research and relegated to the slush-pile of over-stated risks of e-cigarettes, it turns out there’s more. The Center for Environmental Health has announced that they’ve found “high levels” of cancer-causing chemicals in the majority of almost 100 e-cigarettes tested.
A new study being touted as evidence that vaping is a gateway to smoking really only shows that "teens who experiment continue to experiment," and actually provides a pretty solid blueprint for showing vaping is a gateway to anything you want. Here's how to design a study to "support" whatever gateway claim you like.
With widespread claims that e-cigarettes are a threat to public health, evidence-based assessments of the risks are desperately needed. Public Health England has just released such an assessment - updating their previous report in line with new evidence - and is strongly pushing the conclusion that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than smoking.
The picture frequently painted for the public is that nicotine alone creates the addiction to smoking, and that nicotine in itself – whether consumed by smoking or vaping – is hugely addictive. But is this really true? Here's everything you need to know about e-cigarettes and nicotine addiction.
A new study takes aim at flavoring mixtures used for DIY e-liquid mixing, finding that some concentrated flavors contain nicotine. However, with only an uninformative extract available, the details about what they found are fuzzy. We take a look at the full paper, which shows that only two flavor concentrates out of 30 contained quantifiable levels of nicotine.
A new study looking at the effect of e-cigarette vapor on human airway cells has found no sign of toxicity, with the vapor-exposed cells faring about as well as the air-exposed ones. The new finding adds further evidence that the risks associated with vaping are likely to be very small, and almost certainly much less than the risks of smoking.
A new study aims to further the anti-vaping agenda by combining two of the sources of the most indignation about the technology: advertising and the children. Stanton Glantz called the study “direct evidence that e-cig TV ads are recruiting kids to nicotine addiction,” but, as with most things that come out of his mouth, this is pretty much complete nonsense.
New data from ASH UK has shown that – much like in the US – the false belief that e-cigarettes are as dangerous as or more dangerous than smoking is becoming more common in both smokers and the general population. The implication is depressingly clear: frequent misleading statements about e-cigarettes are discouraging smokers from switching to the reduced harm alternative.
A new study from Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos has offered confirmation that previous formaldehyde scares were due to “dry puffs,” and that with more capable atomizers (even at high powers), the levels generated are vastly lower than from cigarettes. The study shows that vapers can easily identify dry puffs, and it's only in these conditions that cigarette-like levels of aldehydes are created.
A new study from Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos looking at existing evidence on the metal emissions from e-cigarettes has determined that vapers don’t need to be concerned about metal exposure. Vapers’ exposure to chromium, cadmium, copper, nickel, lead and cadmium was found to be between 2.6 and 37.4 times lower than the maximum allowable levels in inhalable medicines.
The CDC has released the next set of National Youth Tobacco Survey data, and despite spending the last few years continually harping on about the rising use of e-cigarette by youth and its potential as a gateway to smoking, the “concern” is growing less and less believable, as the data strongly suggests that e-cigarettes are actually causing dramatic declines in youth smoking.
A new study has investigated the flavoring chemicals in e-liquids, and has generated some concern in the media about their risks, with Time using the headline “E-cigarette flavors may be dangerous, study says.” But is this another example of overstating a minor risk for the purpose of spreading mistrust of e-cigs, or is there actually something to it?
A new study has offered further evidence of the harm reduction potential of e-cigarettes, finding that e-cig vapor is less toxic to lung cells than cigarette smoke, and that it also produces less oxidative stress.