Science Vs - Vaping: Is It Really That Bad?

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

More and more people are puffing on vapes — but some governments are making moves to ban them. So how dangerous is vaping, really? And as we inhale that sweet cherry flavor into our lungs, could we also be changing our brains? To find out, we talk to tobacco researcher Dr. Michael Chaiton, inhalation toxicologist Professor Ilona Jaspers, and pharmacology researcher Melissa Herman. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsVaping  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) The fears around vaping (03:41) Could vaping make you sick? (09:45) Are vape flavors dangerous? (20:17) Nicotine and depression (32:03) Is vaping worse than smoking? This episode was produced by Nick DelRose with help from Wendy Zukerman, Joel Werner, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. Our original vaping episode was produced by Kaitlyn Sawrey with help from Lexi Krupp and Meryl Horn. Editing by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, So Wylie, Bumi Hidaka, and Emma Munger. A huge thanks to all the people we spoke to for this episode including: Dr Jamie Harmann-Boyce, Prof Charlotta Pisinger, Prof Neal Benowitz, Dr Emily Stockings, Dr Mohammed Al-Hamdani, Prof Nancy Rigotti, Dr Elizabeth Stevens, Dr Matt Springer, Prof Paul Kenny, Dr Yasmeen Butt, Dr Sean Callahan, Dr Travis Henry, Professor Irfan Rahman, Christopher Harvel, Alex Sandorf, Dr James Pankow, Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos, Professor Lorraine Martin, Professor Moon-Shong Tang, Dr. Kevin Davidson and Myron Ronay. Extra thanks to Conor Duffy, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Follow the show and tap the bell to receive new episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Verses. This is the show that pits facts against fumes. On today's show, vaping. Before we get any further, I need to introduce you to our first guest. Hello, my name's Nina Oyama. I'm a comedian, writer, actress, an inspirational vaporist. This inspirational vaporist first started vaping several years ago when she was in the US.

I was in Los Angeles and somebody gave me a vape there and it was just so much yummier than the Sydney ones at the time. Like, you know how there's different flavours? In Sydney, there was mostly just like, you know, pineapple or like berry or whatever. But in Los Angeles, they had like lush ice and like aloe vera mango sorbet ice that were like quite enjoyable. So what did it feel like in your mouth? It just like felt like a flavoured puff of smoke.

So Nina got into vaping. She used to smoke ciggies, but the hangovers after a night of drinking and smoking just got too nasty. With vapes, she says, it's nice to have something in your hand. It's fun to pass them around at parties. And some people get a head rush. My partner is like, oh, I do it for the head rush. And I around at parties. And some people get a head rush. My partner is like, oh, I do it for the head rush. And I'm like, I don't even get a head rush. Like, I do it. I think it's really funny. Like, if you're in a conversation and you say something really dumb and then you punctuate a bad joke by blowing a vape.

Give me an example of how like a vape could punctuate a joke. I don't know. Like, if you say something stupid and then you just kind of raise your eyebrows and like blow vape out of your mouth and just be like, I don't know how to, I really don't have anything that's coming to mind currently. But like there's just a lot of fun stuff you can do with vapes. And there's a lot of people doing stuff with vapes, particularly kids. About one in ten middle school and high school kids are vaping. That's according to data from the FDA and CDC.

And us adults, we're doing it too. Yeah, it's everywhere. I actually would say most of my friends dabble, at least. Have you ever worried about the health effects of vaping? Be honest, nah. Nah. No, like vapes are vegan, right? Like they're like, vapes are vegan. Okay, but jokes aside, a lot of people are worried about vapes. Governments, health officials.

We're hearing that this is actually a crisis, an epidemic among our youth. Do you want to hear some scary news reports about vapes? Yeah, let's learn about vapes. Vaping could be more dangerous than first thought. Kids don't know just how bad it is for them. Concerned parents, one of their classmates taken to hospital after vaping. Teams who vape are more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety. Now once you get it, you just, you want it more and more and more and more. Today on the show, how dangerous are vapes really?

It felt like for years, scientists were just grappling with what vapes were doing to our brains and bodies. But we are finally getting some answers. When it comes to vaping, luckily, there's lots of... Yeah, let's learn about vapes. And then there's science. Science vs. Vaping is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done?

Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in.

It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is Quantum Magazine's podcast, The February 1st. Welcome back. Today on the show, vapes or e-cigarettes. Comedian and vape press.

Hi, vape press. Is that what we decided to call you? Nina Oyama is joining us as well. Hey, Nina. Hello. Okay, so for the uninitiated, vapes are battery-powered devices that heat up a liquid, turning it into an aerosol that you can inhale. So actually what you are inhaling is an aerosol, so they should be called aerosolers.

Did you know this? You're not actually breathing in vapour. Oh, so it's like a deodorant. I mean, you could think about it like that because vapour is just a gas, but aerosol is like little particles inside a gas, like little bits of crap. Oh, wow. Yes, which is what's in a vape.

But obviously vape sounds cooler than aerosol. Yeah, yeah. Love that. So they were introduced more than a decade ago in the hopes that they would help people quit smoking and that they would help people quit smoking and that they would be safe. But to find out if that's true, we called up Dr. Michael Chayton.

He's a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. Have you tried a vape? Yeah, so I've definitely tried vaping. It's, you know, just you want to be able to see what it's like. Certainly in the 90s when I was a teenager, I was also tried cigarettes as well. It's new. It's novel.

It's like, what is this exactly? So Michael, scientist, but just like us. I don't know, man. He sounds like a nerd. I snorted. He just made me snort. No nerds around here. I wouldn't know them. Never met them. You just made me snort. No nerds around here would know them, never met them. So, nah, man. So one of the big fears around vaping has always been that you're breathing

crap into your lungs and that it could damage them. But for a long time, we didn't really know if this was a big issue or not. And so Michael did this study to find out. And it started with some ads on Facebook and Instagram. In your paper, it just notes that you recruited people in your study via social media. How are you trying to capture the youth? One of our earlier studies, we were doing research on food and we just put disgusting pictures of food, like gross close-ups of meat. And, you know, it's like one weird trick to, you know, understand your food habits. And it was like, fill out this survey. That's the weird trick. Yeah, fill out the survey. Exactly. Exactly. The ethics board was, you know, it was encouraging us to be more boring, but... Not such a nerd now. Okay, so he just did this boring ad over Facebook

and Instagram saying like, can you fill out this survey about vaping? Just over 3,000 people took the bait. They were between 16 and 25. Some of them were ciggy smokers, others stuck to vaping, some used both. And they answered questions like, when you vape, how many puffs do you take? And how old were you when you first tried vaping? And then he also asked them questions about their health. Whether they were coughing or wheezing, or they had colds regularly, difficulty breathing. Other questions were like, were they coughing up phlegm regularly? Did they have shortness of breath? Like, did they run out of breath from simple chores?

Nina, how would you have answered any of those questions? Yeah, I think I pretty much do have a cold all the time. Really? Yeah, but do you think that's from vapes or do you think that's from something else? Just asking questions. So in Michael's study, he checked in and asked people these questions every three months for up to a year. And he saw this very clear trend. For the people who vaped, the more puffs they took,

on average, the more likely they were to have some respiratory symptoms, stuff like a cough or coughing up phlegm, which to Michael, he told us, was worrying, particularly considering how young the people in his study were. If you think about, like, a 19-year-old who's complaining of wheezing, that's not a normal thing, you know, that having a sort of a chronic cough. Also, that's not a normal thing, you know, that having a sort of a chronic cough. Also, that's not a normal thing either. And that's what these youth were reporting.

Yeah. And it's not just Michael's study that's found this. So other research is picking up similar things, you know, seeing that vapors have higher rates of wheezing compared to non-vapors. And now a lot of the symptoms in Michael's study, they weren't that scary. Like no one likes a cough, but you can deal with it. But Michael is worried about what happens next because his study was only for a year or so, right? And he told us that from other research that we know, respiratory symptoms are often the starting place.

You know, so I think respiratory symptoms are one of the canaries in the coal mine. And so one of the things he's worried about is this lung disease that you see with cigarette smoking, which is called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD. What is it? What happens? You just can't breathe.

You can't breathe. And so probably if you've seen people go around with oxygen tanks, that's likely COPD. Uh-huh. So this is where we start getting into like scaremongery land. But COPD kicks in when your lungs are really screwed. We know it is linked to cigarette smoking. We are already seeing some data that it is vaping ups your chance

of getting it, also increases your risk of asthma. Damn. But obviously early days here. Yeah. And also not everyone in Michael's study said that they had those symptoms on his survey. In fact, about one-third of the people who vape daily and stayed off ciggies actually said that they had none of the respiratory stuff

that he was talking about, one third. Okay, so our next question is what is it about vapes that could be causing these symptoms? Because one culprit, something that's been getting a lot of attention, are flavours flavors not my lush eyes no don't take away my lush eyes it's like the best bit of vaping well so then you won't be surprised to hear that one survey showed that 85 of kids who vape are using vape flavors but in crackdowns around the world, governments,

including here in Australia, are trying to ban flavours. So let's look at the science. Are flavours really the bad guys here? And to know that, we have to take a trip to Flavortown. Oh, yeah, flavour country. And our tour guide is Alona Jaspers. We spoke to her a few years ago. She's an inhalation toxicologist and professor at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina, and she studies flavors in vapes.

So if you were to do a personality quiz that was asking what vape flavor are you, what vape flavor would you be? I love meat products and I love blood sausage. I love bologna. Probably say I would be one of those. That's freaking gross, man. Imagine hitting like a meat flavored vape. So Elona told us that one way to find out if these flavors are safe, whether it's your blood sausage or mango, is you have to know what's in them. So we asked her about a very popular flavor, mango. You're a kid. You're thinking like they just boil up a mango and save the essence of it.

Yeah, well, I can guarantee you that is not the case. You're making a different mixture of chemicals that basically then taste like mango. The food industry does this all the time. Yeah, so just like your favorite ice creams and sodas, these vapes are all flavored with like this hodgepodge of flavor chemicals. Oh yeah, duh. Well, I don't think it's a strawberry, that's for sure. No. They used stuff like cinnamaldehyde, benzoaldehyde and isoamyl acetate, which is rebranded as cinnamon, cherry almond and banana. Oh, delicious. So a lot of this stuff had been approved for use in food,

but what's safe to put in your gob isn't necessarily safe for your lungs. So, for example, Nina, have you heard of popcorn lung? Yes. Doesn't your lung, I don't know, get little growths on it like popcorn? Do you know when I heard of popcorn lung, that is exactly what I thought was going on, but it's not. So our story of popcorn lung begins with a chemical called diacetyl, which is used to give things like popcorn and vapes their buttery flavour.

So here's Alona. That's always our example as to why something that's perfectly safe to eat is not perfectly safe to inhale. So as far as we know, diacetyl is fine to eat. You can keep eating your popcorn. But two decades ago, a bunch of workers in a popcorn factory inhaled this stuff in very high doses and they actually got really serious lung injuries.

A few even needed a lung transplant. And back in 2015, there was a case report of someone who used vapes that had diacetyl in it and it damaged his lungs. And so that is just an example that researchers use to say, just because something's safe to eat, it doesn't mean it's safe to inhale. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, because the stuff that you eat, it goes into your stomach and it gets hit by acids in your stomach, gets broken down, filtered out, all that good stuff. But that stuff doesn't happen in your lungs. Like they don't get that industrial style clean. Yeah. So the lung is really not well equipped to detoxify. The lung is really there to take oxygen in and CO2, carbon dioxide back out.

So this popcorn lung, it portends trouble for the other flavors. Yeah. But science being science, you have to test each flavor because it has its own concoction of chemicals. And this is what Alona does. She tests flavors one by one. She'll put them on these little plates, kind of like Petri dishes. And one of the first flavors that she looked at was cinnamon. We basically took different cinnamaldehyde-containing e-liquids and just put it in a Petri dish and walked away for two and a half hours. And it corroded the plastic. Wait, the flavoring in cinnamon corroded plastic?

Yes, it did. Yes, it did. Yes. If this is what it does to plastic, it's probably not going to be good to inhale this into your lungs. Well, I have one question, which is who is smoking cinnamon-flavored vapes? And what is wrong with you? I like that instead of me being like, this is very concerning because it's a result of

vape flavoring. And I'm like, it's not even my flavor. That sounds gross. I think you've gotten the right message from this. I think I'm listening pretty well. Yeah. Okay, well, so to see if the cinnamon flavour does anything for human lung cells, Alona got a dish, doused it with cinnamon

aldehyde and then put little human lung cells into the dish and she found that it affected these bits of the cell called cilia. So cilia are like the little hair-like structures that help sweep gunk away in your lungs. One of the things that we saw was that this cinnamaldehyde completely abolishes the cilia from actually working the way they're designed to work. And so if that is happening in human lungs,

it could make it harder for us to clear away the gunk in our respiratory tract. Now, in a different group of experiments, Alona put immune cells on a petri dish. So this is actually really cool. So if you take immune cells out of a body and then put them with bacteria in a petri dish. The immune cells will still work. They will still gobble up that bacteria. But Alona found that if you add that cinnamon flavour into this mix... When we expose it to cinnamaldehyde, we see that it can no longer do that.

She's seen similar stuff with vanilla flavor. Now, we don't know yet if this stuff is happening inside a human body, inside your lungs, because all of these studies that Alona does, they're in stuff like petri dishes. Yes. But the fact that we don't know what they're doing inside a human body, that is very frustrating for a loner. When you have a new product, the safety testing is first done in the petri dish and in mice.

And if that fails, it never makes it into a human. Wait, but that's bonkers because in this case, everyone's like tried it already and now you're backtracking. I know, I know. I know. It is kind of wild. And, you know, it's not just the flavours that might be mucking up your lungs. There are other chemicals that scientists are worried about.

Wait, there are more chemicals? Yes. A big one is called propylene glycol. So this is the chemical that's used in those machines in clubs and on like theatre stages that produces stuff that looks like smoke. Oh, like a fog machine. Yes. So that is propylene glycol.

So it really is a tiny smoke machine. That's wild. Yeah, no, it is. It's cool as a chemical, but when people breathe it in, it has been shown to cause some respiratory symptoms. And I think just like zooming out so we don't go through all of the chemicals one by one, I mean, for a lot of the stuff that you are breathing in when you suck in a vape,

it's these teeny tiny particles that kind of bounce around your delicate lungs like teeny tiny wrecking balls, causing damage, causing stuff like inflammation. And in fact, one study just came out that, you know, it was just a small study, but they actually found more inflammation in the lungs of vapers than cigarette smokers. So I think just generally, here is how Michael thinks about vapes. It's like breathing in really small pieces of dirt. Like the particles themselves are essentially, you know, like small pieces of dirt.

You can imagine them in that way, tiny grains of sand that are entering your lungs and potentially damaging them. Huh. How are you feeling, by the way, with all that lung talk? I mean, was any of it surprising? It's like I have always suspected that vapes are bad for me. And now I just know a little bit more about why that's true, I guess. And what do you think about the immune system stuff? Does that make you wonder about all those cold symptoms you've been having?

Yeah. Well, that actually makes sense to me. Maybe it's the vape use. Ooh, spooky. Science. Okay, so that is our lungs. But with vapes, scientists are worried about something else altogether, how vapes could be messing with your brain. And that's coming up after the break.

Welcome back. We just looked into the science of what vaping might be doing to your lungs, and now we're moving north to what vaping is doing to your brain. With us is comedian and high empress of vaping, Nina Oyama. Hey, Nina. Hello. To find out if vapes are screwing with your brain, we called up Melissa Herman. She's an associate professor in pharmacology at UNC Chapel Hill. And before we dove into the science, I had to ask her this burning question of mine.

I saw a video on your Twitter of an elf in your lab fridge. Can you explain what was going on there? Yes, that is Rigsby. He's our holiday elf. The lab members position him around the holidays doing different scientific things. His name is from an electrophysiological recording rig, which is our favorite piece of equipment in the lab. But he has dabbled in immunohistochemistry. I don't think he's been in our vape chambers, but maybe that's for next year. Okay, there's one chemical that Melissa is studying in her vape chamber, above all else, and it's nicotine. Yeah. So for a long time, people thought nicotine was pretty safe. It's addictive, of course. It's the thing that makes you want to keep vaping. But that doesn't mean it's dangerous necessarily. But just to start, I asked Melissa about the amount of nicotine in vapes. As a general rule, if I took like your

average vape versus your average cigarette, puffed each of them, which one would give me more nicotine? The vape. Oh, really? By far. Yes, yes. And there are companies that are actually designing it with that in mind. Oh, of course. This is a huge benefit, right? I mean, that's why they're putting all this nicotine in there, right?

So that we keep using their products. Yes. Yeah, so vapes can have a lot of nicotine in them and studies have found that you can't even really trust what's on the packet to know just how much. So even there have been studies that looked into vape products that were labelled as nicotine-free and found nicotine in some of them. That's terrible.

And Melissa is worried about this, yes, because nicotine itself is addictive, but also because of this pattern that we've been documenting actually since the 1980s, and it's this. It's this link between depression and nicotine. Oh. So we started seeing that people with depression were more likely

to be smokers and people who smoked were more likely to later be diagnosed with depression. And we're actually seeing the same pattern with vapes. So vapers are more likely to be diagnosed with depression and to even have suicidal thoughts compared to people who don't vape. Is this something that you've been worried about have suicidal thoughts compared to people who don't vape. Is this something that you've been worried about or your friends have talked about? Because I guess I was never aware of this, like, before.

I was not either. I think that I have had a pretty rocky mental health consistently. Like, I think especially when I was younger, I was, like, so depressed. Like, I dropped out of school because I was like too depressed to function. Like I flunked the first year of uni because like I couldn't get out of bed. Like I was pretty much in the wars well before I started smoking cigarettes. And so I kind of obviously like this is just my personal journey, but I personally don't think smoking cigarettes or vaping has made my mental health worse because it's only gotten better since I was a teenager.

I mean, I think for researchers in this space who are seeing that connection, there's always been this question of whether the ciggies or the nicotine caused the depression or whether people were kind of who were feeling crappy then started smoking. Yeah. I mean, even if you just like think of that cliche of a 90s teen smoker, you know, like tough baddies sneaking a ciggy behind the high school gym, I guess how many of those kids were already depressed or already going to develop depression

and then picked up a cigarette to cope. And so Melissa actually tries to use rodents, like mice, to study this. I don't work with humans. I work with preclinical rodent models because they're free of all the cultural baggage expectation they don't rodents don't have any understanding of the 90s they don't like none of that culture comes into play it's just biology that's funny that's like yeah they just don't they don't remember like when brindy spears had free will exactly so melissa uses rodents to try to get at this question of whether nicotine might be contributing to people's depression or if we've just kind of got this correlation causation all mixed up. Now,

interestingly, using rodents and cigarettes to try to answer this question is difficult, partly because of this fun fact about rodents. You don't see rats or mice voluntarily smoking cigarettes. They won't do that because they understand smoke is toxic. So they would do everything they could to get away from it. Humans had no problem. Yeah. So rodents don't smoke, but they will vape. Now they don't hold a vape. They don't have the little, the little like handsies to hold a vape. So this is where the vape chambers come into it. She has mice in plastic boxes and then on one side of the box

there's this little hole and then if the mice poke their nose into that hole, it triggers a release of the vape and, oh, boy, oh, boy, do they love it. They literally will go over to the hole and very, very intentionally just, oh. Okay, so here's where the video that I sent you comes in. Do you want to see it, right? Oh, yeah.

Dude, they're like hotboxing these rats with vape juice. Oh, my God. That is exactly. And so using these chambers, Melissa has been seeing what it does to the mousy brains. Oh, yeah. So, like, there's one study that she did with male mice and she gave them these clouds of vape once a day for five days and then her team dressed up the mice like Mickey Mouse

and they all sang together. Wait. No. They killed them and sliced up their brains instead. Oh, okay. You know, you've just said, I just watched some rats vape, and so I was like, you know what? That's completely plausible.

I didn't know if the joke would land, given the context, but you know what would have made that joke way better? If you had a vape. Yeah. Okay. So what Melissa has found in these mice is that over time there's this particular area of the brain called the central amygdala, and it does stuff like process emotions. And

Melissa finds that when you give mice nicotine at first, that part of the brain kind of lights up and gets really excited, right? But after five days on nicotine, that's not what happens. It doesn't react how she would expect. And so Melissa is now wondering whether something similar is happening in humans and whether basically nicotine might be affecting this region of our brain and might be affecting how we process our emotions. Yeah. Now that research is really new right now. It's just in rodents. But there is other work that's more established that suggests that nicotine might be messing with a different part of our brain, which is called the reward system. So basically, there's these neurons in a part of our brain that will release dopamine when you do something nice, like have great sex. Or smelling a flower. That's nice and G-rated. Sure. Yes. Very nice. You smell a flower. There's a spike of dopamine. You'll remember the

flower. You feel good about the flower. And most importantly, you encode the idea that that flower smelled good and that that was an enjoyable experience. Now, when you smoke or vape or just get nicotine into your system, your brain kind of does something similar. Yeah. Like that is why when you take a puff of a vape, it might feel good in the moment, right? So far, so good.

If you, and this is where nicotine and the flower are very different, you smelled the flower, you presumably went on about your day and remembered that that was a nice thing you did. Nicotine has immediate actions in the brain, and particularly as people continue administering nicotine, it stays there. Yeah, so if you are a regular vapor, all that puffing throughout the day would keep nicotine circulating through your

blood and your brain. And it becomes actually like so much for your reward system that it kind of ends up going like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like this is too much dopamine. Melissa says you can kind of think about nicotine like a speaker that is blasting music into your brain. That system is not designed to be switched on and left at full volume. So from what we can tell, the reward system then tries to adapt to this loud noise, to having too much dopamine. Yeah. So for example, in studies in rodents, you can see that their brains will become a little less responsive to nicotine.

Like they're just trying to adapt, trying to turn that music down. And then the idea is that as this happens, you might get less dopamine, which could mean that you don't get as much enjoyment from smoking or vaping as you used to, but maybe it also affects other stuff. Is it just so like when you, you know, puff on a cigarette, you don't feel as good as you used to as the first time when you puffed on a cigarette? Or is that like when you smell a flower, you know,

if you've had cigarette use for two years, your flower enjoyment will go down? Yeah, that's such a good question. So some researchers like Melissa think that those changes in the brain could mean that you don't get as much enjoyment from the flower either. Now, a lot of the basis for that, that kind of piece of this puzzle comes from rodent studies, and we are still working out what this means in people

because, you know, clearly not everyone who vapes ends up getting depression, but we do see that people who vape are more likely to get depression than people who don't vape. And we also know that one of the symptoms of depression is feeling less joy from things that used to give you joy. So, bottom line, when Melissa looks at the evidence and hears people saying things like,

nicotine is safe, it's just addictive, she's like, it is not free from concern. Yes, yes. It's not an innocent bystander here. No. Okay, so our last question is, does all of this new science around vaping suggest that it is actually worse than cigarettes? I want to know.

So for this one, let's go back to Dr. Michael Chayton. So remember that study he did at the start of our conversation where he found that two-thirds of people who vaped daily had some respiratory symptoms? Yeah. Yeah. Well, in his study, it also captured people who smoked cigarettes, and he found something else in his data.

Our first finding was that cigarettes aren't good for you. What? What? So I know it's a shocking finding. Yeah, so even though the people in Michael's survey were actually relatively light smokers, they reported more respiratory symptoms than anyone else on average. So, I mean, cigarettes are just so bad for you. One researcher we spoke to described smoking cigarettes as like putting your mouth over a car exhaust pipe. Damn.

Yeah. Estimates reckon that in the US about one third of the deaths from cancer are caused by ciggies. So one in three people who died from cancer, that's from cigarettes. I mean, it's just huge. Around the world, we're talking about millions of people dying each year. So even when we say that vaping is bad, that doesn't mean it's worse than cigarettes. Here's Michael. It's clearly harmful. It clearly has harmed. But when you look at it in context of cigarettes, most people feel that it's very likely to be much safer. Yeah. So I think after

we've spent like half an hour explaining to people the dangers of vaping, we just really need to stamp on this point that at least according to most of the data out there right now, vaping is still considered better than cigarettes. Great. So it's healthy. So here's my analogy. Smoking cigarettes is like getting run over by a car and dragged for 10 miles. So when we say vaping is safer than that.

It's like just getting run over by a car. That's right, and you're not dragged for 10 miles. Exactly, exactly. No, that makes sense. Did hearing all the science, like, did it change? Are you thinking about vaping differently at all? I think about it differently, but I'm also like, if the question is, am I going to stop? The answer is no. Does everything we've done together mean nothing to you, Nina? I can grapple. If you want me, I can be like, yeah, when I, you know,

I thought I would keep vaping but, you know, when I saw my vape sitting on my shelf, I threw it in the bin because of the way that it affects my lungs. Wait, but don't lie. But don't lie. But wait, don't. What do you want from me, Wendy? But why wouldn't you quit?

Why isn't the science enough, you know, to make you or other mates who know the science go, all right, all right, I'm done? It's not bad. Is it not bad enough? Is the research too early? I think vapes are bad. But I also do think like alcohol is bad. And I think like I do think vapes to me are sort of like normalized in the way that they are advised.

It's like having a glass of wine with dinner, but for your lungs. And I guess when all this information that's presented to me is like, don't vape, it's like, duh. If I had told you that eating vegetables every day was actually harmful. Oh, yeah, I would never eat another vegetable again. But maybe I'm just making excuses for myself to continue vaping. Who knows? Thanks, Nina. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. That's Science Versus. Hello? Hey, Nick Delrose, producer at Science Versus.

Hey, Wendy. That was a really natural way to start a conversation, don't you think? No. An even more natural question is, how many citations are in this week's episode? There are 142 citations. Oh, my God, 142 citations. That might be close to a record.

If people want to read these citations, find out more about vaping, where should they go? They can follow our link in our show notes to our transcript. Thanks, Nick. All right. Thanks, Wendy. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find us anywhere. If you are listening on Spotify, follow us. Press follow and then tap the bell icon so that you'll get episode notifications. It'll say new Science Versus episodes, so you'll catch us as soon as we're out. And also if you want to catch us on social media, we're there too on Instagram. We're at science underscore VS. I'm on TikTok at Wendy Zuckerman. Come and say hello. This episode was produced by Nick Delrose with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman,

Joel Werner, Rose Brimler and Michelle Dang. Our original vaping episode was produced by Caitlin Sorey, with help from Lexi Krupp and Meryl Horn. Editing by Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka and Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, So Wiley, Bumi Hidaka and Emma Munger.

A huge thanks to all of the people that we spoke to for this episode, including Dr. Jamie Harmon-Boyce, Professor Charlotte Piesinger, Professor Neil Benowitz, Dr. Emily Stockings, Dr. Mohamed Alhamdani, Professor Nancy Rigardi, Dr. Elizabeth Stevens, Dr. Matt Springer, Professor Paul Kenney, Dr. Yasmin Bhatt, An extra thanks to Connor Duffy, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. I'm the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll fact you next time.