Vapes, firstly coming in the form of e-cigarettes, have taken the world by storm ever since they appeared on the market. Nowadays, they’re almost as common as cigarettes, making many people wonder what exactly is the deal and just why are they so popular.
In today’s article, we’ll be breaking down the similarities and differences of vapes and cigarettes!
Taste
Let’s not beat around the bush – cigarettes don’t exactly taste nice. Even though the smell of tobacco leaves is attractive to many people, even non-smokers, the aftertaste in the mouth after inhaling smoke can best be described as dark and charry.
Even though some smokers prefer this to the many different vaping flavors, it can be safely said that the biggest difference between vaping and actual cigarettes is the variety of tastes.
Admittedly, there are differences between each and every cigarette box – usually in intensity and strength. However, most of them don’t exactly have a flavor. Vapes, on the other hand, come in thousands of flavors.
So, with vapes, you can choose anything from smoking lemon-flavored smoke to a sea salt-flavored smoke – depending on what you feel like today. Whereas with cigarettes, it’s all just different intensities of smoke at the end of the day.
Contents
Another big difference are the contents of the smoking apparatus. Cigarettes are full of tobacco, as we all know. Salt nic mods, on the other hand, use liquids to produce smoke. Even though nicotine is definitely involved in the process, it doesn’t work the same way cigarettes do.
Cigarettes deliver the nicotine to your body via tobacco – when the tobacco burns, you inhale nicotine (and a bunch of dangerous toxins) into your body. Vaping delivers nicotine too, but in the form of a liquid that’s turned into smoke, which is less harmful.
A note has to be said about the last statement. Even though scientists now believe that vaping is less harmful than smoking cigarettes – we have nowhere near enough data to be able to say that with certainty.
Additionally, just because it’s safer than smoking, doesn’t mean that it’s safe. Inhaling nicotine into your body is still dangerous.
A big advantage of vaping in comparison to smoking cigarettes is that you can control the amount of nicotine you get. Different liquids have different percentages of nicotine in them, so you can control how much you’re actually taking.
Dangers
Because they’re different ways of smoking, vapes and cigarettes have different side effects, even though many of them corelate and overlap.
Cigarettes are, without a doubt, the leading cause of lung cancer in the world. Depending on the number of cigarettes a person consumes, they can cause damage to every single organ in your body.
They’ll also increase the risk of heart diseases. If you’re an athlete, cigarettes will definitely limit your lung capacity, affecting your performances drastically. With pregnant women, smoking is extremely dangerous for the fetus.
Lastly, in men, it’s now well-known that it reduces sperm count. Even though most short-term effects will disappear once a person stops smoking, some of these effects can be permanent.
With vaping, on the other hand, there’s a difference because we don’t know as nearly as much about it as we do about cigarettes. We know that even though vapes contain nicotine, you can inhale it in much smaller amounts. Vapes also contain chemicals, just like cigarettes, that are dangerous for the body.
An example of that is vitamin E acetate – one of the most harmful ingredients in vapes. However, this ingredient was actually removed from vapes, which made them much safer than before.
Can Vapes Help You Stop Smoking
A popular use of vapes isn’t to smoke – quite the opposite, it’s to stop smoking. Many people have successfully utilized vapes with this purpose in mind, and it can really work in some cases.
The theory behind it is simple – downgrade the amount of nicotine with time until you can completely give it up. This method is actually backed up by scientific research and it’s a method some doctors endorse when it comes to quitting smoking.
According to a clinical trial in the UK, smokers who switch to vapes as a form of downgrading their nicotine intake before completely quitting are two times more successful than people who quit cold turkey!
This is why many manufacturers of vapes insist that the purpose of the devices isn’t to substitute cigarettes, but it’s actually there to help smokers give it up for good.