So are e-cigs healthy?
Can I use them to kick the habit?

Let’s be honest anything you take into your lungs apart from clean air is most likely harmful in some way or another, refined tobacco smoke in cigarettes and rolling tobacco can contain up to 4000 different chemicals that has adverse effects on your health short term and long term, including, morning cough, phlegm discharge, shortness of breath and leading in the long term even to cancer and emphysema in some cases. We would have to be quite naïve to believe that electronic cigarettes even without those 4000 chemicals contained in tobacco, is a healthy practice.

Over the last few years a number of medical research studies show very promising results and we can cautiously assume that due to the lack of those harmful chemicals and the positive early results thus far, vaping is a smoking alternative that isn’t nearly as harmful as smoking, that said the only truly healthy alternative to smoking cigarettes in any shape way or form is not smoking. 

We came across this article which offers some great information on the ‘healthier alternative’ debate surrounding electronic cigarettes and has some input from the Electronic Cigarette Industry Trade Association (ECITA EU Ltd)
president Katherine Devlin

‘…Reacting to a story published in this newspaper (TMID, 21.06.2012) entitled ‘Electronic cigarettes not considered legitimate therapy to quit smoking’, Ecita (EU) Ltd president Katherine Devlin provided what she said were “scientifically factual responses” to a number of concerns about e-cigarettes. She said that while it is correct to say that e-cigarettes are not ‘quit smoking medication’ and that all such claims in any Maltese advertising are illegal, e-cigarettes are not tobacco products either….’

-Malta Independent Online

27 June 2012

If you shop around the internet or throw a few search words on Google you will probably find blogs or forums which suggest or hint at electronic cigarettes being a way to kick the habit, some may even promote them as such, but the bottom line is that the active ingredient in e-liquids just like in traditional cigarettes, nicotine, is an addictive substance. The risk you run whether you smoke or as electronic cigarette users call it, vape, is addiction to nicotine.

The e-cig has one ace up its sleeve, nicotine free e-liquid. As the name implies these e-liquids don’t contain nicotine and as such some could well use this or see it as a way to kick the smoking habit by keeping the feel of the smoking action, hand to mouth, flavour and vapour and lacking the nicotine content, for some people this method of gradually quitting smoking in the absence of nicotine addiction is a possibility but that wont necessarily work for one and all and we wouldn’t recommend you turn to electronic cigarettes as a smoking cessation method. While there are a lot of products out there you can use that are specifically made in order to quit smoking, e-cigs aren’t really one of them, if anything they’re a great way to shift to something that carries the same relief as a cigarette without being as damaging to your health.

So far public health and clinical studies from Health New Zealand Ltd and the Boston University School of Public Health are showing e-cigs to be less harmful than tobacco cigarettes, with early results indicating e-cigs are “much safer” with a level of toxicity similar to nicotine replacements, and the The American Association of Public Health Physicians (AAPHP) started supporting the sale of electronic cigarettes to adults in April 2010 citing "because the possibility exists to save the lives of four million of the eight million current adult American smokers who will otherwise die of a tobacco-related illness over the next
twenty years."

While this is all very promising for e-cig users it is important to keep in mind that electronic cigarettes are a young product and the electronic cigarette industry is still in its infancy, there are no concrete studies on the long term effects of electronic cigarettes on people’s health and given how difficult it would be to set up and maintain such a study there won’t be one for a while.