Stuff You Should Know - Is Vaping Really Bad For You?

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

E-cigs, vapes, whatever you call them they have been touted as a safer alternative to tobacco and even a way for people to quit smoking. But recent studies have found that perhaps they’re not so harmless after all. So who’s right? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, Colorado. The state's so nice, we're playing there twice. That's right. Two days in a row, Chuck. We added a second show to our Gothic Theater tour.

That's right. We're gonna be there June 7th and June 28th now. The 28th is sold out, but one of those weird cases where you go see the first show, you are actually late buying tickets. Right, we're also gonna be in Boston April 4th, D.C. April 5th. We're gonna be in St. Louis on May 22nd,

and Cleveland on May 23rd. And then of course, we're gonna wrap this summer up on June 27th to 28th at the Gothic Theater in Colorado. So go to sysklive.com for all of your information and ticket needs. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and there's Jerry Smokin' Rowland over there. He's just a cloud chaser. Is that what they call smokers? Dude, I looked up terminology, vape terminology. Cloud chaser, really? Because I wanted to punish myself.

And that's apparently, I don't know. That's what this website says. That sounds like the kind of thing somebody who wears like a flannel shirt tied around their waist would call somebody who vapes. Yeah, oh no, these are vapors who puff fat clouds. You've seen those people? Yeah.

With just ridiculous amounts of smoke, or not even smoke, whatever it is. Whatever it is is the right thing to say, Chuck, because no one's quite sure. Yeah. So we're talking electronic cigarettes, e-cigarettes. If you go to the FDA website, they're called Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems.

They don't, people don't even call them e-cigarettes anymore, do they? Or do they? I don't know, I felt so square researching this, because it's such an ever-evolving thing. You have to be like right in the thick of it to know. I saw e-cigs a lot. Oh really?

Still today. Well, and by the media? Yeah. Yeah. I think they just call it vaping. Right, okay, so vapes. Vapors. Vapors.

Right. You see it more and more. Sure. These days. The kids, which is kind of a problem, the kids seem to be enjoying this. Although I can't say anything, because I was thinking about this,

I'm like, gosh, teenagers are trying this? And I was like, I was 14 when I started smoking tobacco. Yeah. Like every day for 20 years. Probably Marlboro Reds or something. Yes, indeed, Marlboro Reds. Although when you're that young and you ride up on your bike to the convenience store to buy cigarettes,

just kind of, you'll take whatever you can get. Yeah. But it strikes me as absolutely nuts when now that I don't smoke anymore, the idea of like teenagers smoking, it's just weird. Yeah. But some people kind of have this idea that it's wrong-headed to compare e-cigs or vapes.

Who knows what they're called? With r-cigs. With regular cigs or non-vapes cigs, right? And that you could make a case that it's possible, it's fine that teenagers are doing this, really. Some might say. Or at the very least, they might say, if I had to choose a teenager smoking an e-cigarette

or tobacco, I would always choose the e-cigarette. Yeah, and I think that's one of the main points that we're gonna hammer home throughout this whole thing, is that it is still sort of the Wild Wild West. And that's one of the big issues, is that no one really knows the deal a lot of times with what's in here, how it's reacting in the body, what the manufacturers, I mean, it's all just,

we're all just kind of guessing right now. For sure, for a couple of reasons. One, they're so new, but two, here in the United States, it wasn't until 2016 that the FDA gained regulatory control over these things. Before it was like, they could put anything into the e-juice, who knows what it's actually called, that you're smoking and you would have no idea

what's in there, there was no regulation whatsoever, until 2016. So yeah, it is like you said, the Wild Wild West still, they're still figuring this out. And depending on what country you're in, they're either a great way to quit smoking tobacco, or to smoke instead of smoking tobacco, or they're just as bad as cigarettes,

if not worse in some respects. Yeah, or they're a gateway to a kid who may not have even started smoking cigarettes, but tried this because it tastes like peaches and cream, and then they get hooked on the nicotine. I remember when Joe Camel came out in the 90s, and they were like, you can't have this cartoon camel hawking cigarettes because you're clearly targeting kids.

Well, at least he never had peaches and cream flavor, which by the way, I was looking at ingredients in tobacco, because now in the United States, cigarette companies have to list the ingredients on their websites at least. Because that's what all smokers do, is go to the website to see what they're smoking. What's in this, let me see.

High fructose corn syrup is in cigarettes. That doesn't surprise me. It doesn't if you stop and think about it, but if you stop one more time and think about it, you're like, that stuff is everywhere. Yeah. So, e-cigs. Yeah, they were invented by a pharmacist in China

named Han Lick, who I believe his father died of lung cancer from smoking. That's what I saw. And I don't know if that was the impetus to create this or not, but he did patent the device in 2003, and as soon as I read that, I was like, man, I bet this guy is a gazillionaire. You wanna hear something very surprising?

What? He is not the first person to patent an e-cigarette. Well, and he's also, I mean, I'm not sure how much his net worth is, but he's still currently kind of battling for rights to make money and stuff. Wild, wild west. Wild, wild west. So, back in the 60s, the mid-60s,

a man named Herbert A. Gilbert, which is, that's a 1960s inventor's name, if I've ever heard one, he patented something that is basically an e-cigarette. And then apparently even further back than that, in the 1920s, someone patented a vaporizer pen, not necessarily for cigarette use. But they were human spirit vapors. It's my grandmother's soul.

Here's the deal. We haven't even said what it is yet. I figured everyone knows because it seems to be their ubiquitous these days. But an e-cigarette is, it's a battery-powered device. Usually it looks, sometimes it can look like a cigarette that even lights up on the end, but I don't see a lot of those anymore.

No, it was kind of an early thing. I think so. And just to make you feel more like you were smoking. But now they just look like little pins with a cartridge and it converts that liquid nicotine into a vapor that you inhale. So you're not actually burning nicotine. There's no smoke, even though it looks like smoke,

that's, I don't even know what you call it, vapor. It's vapor, for sure. Exhalation. Depending on what's in the stuff that you're inhaling or vaporizing. Fat clouds. Fat clouds, right? But yeah, that's it.

You hit the nail on the head. Combustion isn't involved. Those little coils in there that get heated up by the battery bring the vapor or the liquid up to its boiling point, converting it to vapor, and then that's what you inhale. And since there's no combustion, you're not getting all the extra stuff that you get

when you smoke tobacco, like tar. Well, there is no tobacco in here. There isn't. And that's a really big point that even in articles about the difference between tobacco and e-cigarettes, they call this stuff interchangeably, like tobacco. These are not tobacco. Tobacco is a plant that contains nicotine

that we have learned over the centuries to smoke. Or chew. As a delivery system for that nicotine. The problem is, is there's a lot of other stuff, bad stuff, that come from inhaling that tobacco. It's not necessarily the nicotine itself, although it is a highly addictive drug when inhaled. The point of these cigarettes, at least one of the points is,

is that you can still get that nicotine without the tobacco. It's separated from the tobacco, put in this other solution and that you heat up without combustion and inhale, and then birds just kind of chirp around your head and you're suddenly dressed like snow white. And you say, what was in that e-juice?

Or is it, and we'll talk about all this. This is, I'm just teasing ahead, but is nicotine even bad for you if you're not burning it from tobacco? Is nicotine itself? Yes. Because that one dude, I think from the 70s, in one of these articles you sent,

said, you know, people come for nicotine, but they die from tar. Yeah, Michael Russell, he was a South African scientist who basically was the guy who changed the way we viewed cigarettes. Like up to that point, it was a psychological habit smoking was.

And he said, no, actually we're addicted to nicotine, and it's a physiological addiction. Yes, so you've heard that like, and that came from, there's this really great article, if not a little one-sided, Enrolling Stone, from 2013 by David Amsden. It's a tough one to say. But he talked about that guy, right?

And that guy, out of that whole thing, this big push to get people to quit smoking, then focused on nicotine as an addictive drug, and you had to smoke tobacco to get your addictive drug and the tobacco is gonna kill you, so just quit smoking all together. Apparently nicotine is not addictive unless you inhale it. So whether you're inhaling it in water vapor or tobacco,

yes, it is an addictive drug. Right, so back to the device itself, there are many kinds you can get out there. Some of them are just sort of long and thin, like a ballpoint pen, and there is no button or device, just simply inhaling it, putting your mouth on the tip

and inhaling it will activate it. Other ones have little buttons on them that you push to activate the system that consist of three parts, which is the rechargeable battery, and when you think of a rechargeable lithium battery, you think of a little tiny thing, that's the main body of these pens is the battery.

Then you have the little cartridge or the vaporization chamber. No, no, sorry, those are two different things. Vaporization chamber is where the party takes place, and the cartridge is where the liquid is stored. Right, so the vaporization chamber has the atomizer in it, and that's the thing that has the heating coils that heat up the e-juice.

Yeah, the heating coils, which I just saw this today, they might be a problem as well. I saw that as well. And that's part of the Wild Wild West thing. They're testing the juice, the juice, the jus, to see if that's dangerous, but now I just saw a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives

from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that said that these coils are burning, these metal coils are producing lead, chromium, manganese, and or nickel. So that's part of the device itself that is now being heated and mixed with the vape. Yeah, toxic metals, you don't want that stuff in your- Now that's the stuff in cigarettes

that people wanna get rid of. Right, and part of the problem, I also saw another study that found that some of those toxic metals are in concentrations as high as cigarettes, if not higher. Yeah, right. Because it can vary, I think, depending on your device. Yes, and they found it also in that same study

that it seemed that the amounts were higher in frequently changed atomizers. So it's like a new- I want peaches and cream today, but later today I want Oreo. Right, and if you're changing out your atomizer, the new head, a fresh head, seems to leach more toxic chemicals.

And then it stops after a period of time. Gotcha, not the cartridge. No, not the cartridge, the atomizer with the coils, right? Yeah, that makes sense. So yeah, so you don't want that stuff. Part of the reason you're inhaling nicotine is because it delivers it right to your brain, basically, from your lungs.

It's a really efficient delivery system. So you wanna cut down on the additional stuff that's being delivered right to your brain, like lead, because you take a big long pull off a e-sig, it's got a bunch of lead in it. There goes 10 IQ points. See you later. The cartridges, this liquid that's in there is nicotine

and the delivery system is usually propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin. Which, I mean, we'll get to all this. Yeah, we're jumping ahead of ourselves. Yes, that is what that's made of. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll be, we're gonna go puff some fat clouds,

be back right after this. Here, the 50'sonne screen. On the podcast Hey Dude, The 90's called David Lassher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slipdresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. They're on the inside because you love and shock. So is that really what some people call it, fat clouds? I've seen people make fun of people by saying that. OK. So I think it has been said. All right.

Vapors, they take a lot of grief from people. Well, they push boundaries a lot. Yeah, but the whole culture is kind of ripe for setterization and ridicule, I think, by people who don't do it. Yeah. Is that fair to say? It seems that way.

Like there's got to be a Portlandia sketch about sidewalk vapors, don't you think? So here's the thing with the cartridges, though, is not all of them even have nicotine. Sometimes, and I don't get this at all. I don't get it either. But sometimes people just vape flavor. That is stupid.

That is a stupid thing to do. Because consider this, it's bad enough if you're doing this to get nicotine, right? Right. You're a drug addict if you're doing this to get nicotine. So yeah, you're probably going to get some toxic metals, and that may or may not mean a lot to you. It may mean enough for you to quit.

It may not mean anything to you. You just keep on keeping on. Right. But if you're huffing toxic metals just to get a strawberry flavor, you're a dummy. And just stop doing that immediately. Well, but what if that is what you do in place of this bad smoking habit you had?

Well, then you should learn more about what you're inhaling. Because you're probably not smoking the nicotine because of your worry what it's going to do to your health. So just stop altogether. Go get some dum-dum lollipops, dum-dum. Well, no. I mean, that's clearly. And there are some studies that we'll get to later

that pretty recent ones that have tested people who smoke and vape, because that's sort of one of the problems is sometimes people do both because they want to get that nicotine hit, but they're at a party where you can't smoke or whatever. Right. That's like the worst case scenario that you're doing both. Yeah, that you're using it to smoke more frequently

because you're smoking in places where you can't normally smoke tobacco. Right. So like I said, we'll get to that test. But they tested people who do both, people who do one, and people who do none. And of course, doing nothing is the best case scenario. Yeah, and I want to go back a couple of steps.

I don't mean to be all holier than thou. I certainly don't think I'm any better than anybody who smokes just because I quit. With the benefit of hindsight, now that I don't smoke, it's tough not to just be like, stop smoking. You're going to thank yourself. I know you want to. There are very few smokers out there

who are dyed in the wool, cigarette smokers who are like, man, I love smoking still 20 years on. They probably want to quit, which is the sad thing. Yeah. So I'm sorry everybody if I came off as holier than that. It says in here, and I don't know how accurate this still is, but it says the cartridges last about as long as a pack of cigarettes. I don't know if that's still accurate

because there are so many different kinds of tanks and cartridges you can get these days. I think it generally does, though. Because they sell them at a certain price point. And I think it's comparable depending on where you live to a pack of cigarettes, like a pack of New York $12 cigarettes, I think. But that's if you buy the cartridges, use them up,

and then buy another cartridge. You can also buy a vaporizer that has a refillable cartridge that always stays on, and you just refill it yourself because you're a thrifty person. Yeah, that'd be like, I guess, kind of like rolling your own cigarettes. It would be. You'd probably get a little more bang for your buck

there, right? You definitely do, but you know. And you look cool. Do you? No, I don't know. You look European. It's a pain, though. I mean, I went through a cigarette rolling phase,

but it's like, you want a cigarette right then? Man, I've got to wait 45 seconds until I get this thing just right. No, I just ripped the paper, and now I have to start over. Just get rid of the cigarette. Yeah, when I was young and dumb. See, I was in a smoker smoker. I would just smoke occasionally, which always bugs smokers.

And when I did my big Europe trip fresh out of college, I just thought it was the coolest thing to roll up my drum cigarettes. Drum, OK. And walking around in Paris. Yeah. Check me out, Frenchies. What a dumb, dumb.

Again. Did you have a beret on, at least? No, I smoked that, too. So you used to roll? I had it on day one, but I smoked it. All right, so we might as well get into some of these health studies and concerns. Like we said over and over, one of the big problems

is we certainly don't know about long-term health effects. No, it's too new. And are just learning about some of the short-term effects. Well, the thing is, it's too new to know about e-cigarettes specifically. But from these early tests that are coming back, we know a lot about some of the chemicals that are showing up in these tests.

And some of them are like, whoa, Nellie, you do not want that in your brain. Right. There's one in particular. Some of these you can just tell from the names of them. It is terrible. But acrylonitrile, I believe it's acrylonitrile. It is, yeah, I think I nailed it even

without even looking at it. It is a very toxic poison that's used in the creation of acrylic fibers. I think maybe even some rubber. It's a plastic. It's a viable plastic. Sounds like something you want to burn and inhale. Yeah, well, the problem is it is metabolizing your body

into cyanide. So that's just one example of some of the stuff they're finding in the bloodstream of people who smoke e-cigarettes. And again, it's too soon to say what kind of effects these are having. But these chemicals have been documented for so many decades now that when they pop up, we can say basically

automatically, you shouldn't be doing that to yourself. And I think part of the big problem is the regulatory issues. It's finally under the FDA's wing, right? As of 2016, yeah. But they're still so new that they're not even making official statements yet, are they? Or are they?

So here's the thing. This is a very bizarre thing, Chuck. They now regulate these things like tobacco. But it's not tobacco. In the US. Yes. So if you buy a vape pen or vapor cartridge or something like that, and it has nicotine in it, it's to the FDA,

you're buying a pack of cigarettes. To an e-cig user, that would drive you crazy. Because you might be smoking e-cigarettes because you don't smoke tobacco, because tobacco is something that's very, very, very bad for you. Supposedly e-cigarettes are a better alternative to that. To the FDA, they're the exact same thing. Right, and to an e-cigarette.

I mean, I get their complaint, because they can say, listen, you can buy nicotine patches and nicotine gum, and it doesn't have health warnings on there. And that's all we're doing is ingesting nicotine. We're not burning tobacco, just like somebody who's nicotine gum isn't burning tobacco. So why? It's because they look like cigarettes.

And you puff fat clouds. Yeah, and that's a thing that David Amstone says, and this is that. That's really the big distinction. If you're using it to quit smoking, it's the same thing as nicotine gum, and you can just go buy that over the counter with no warnings on the box at all.

But here, there are warnings. It is treated like tobacco. And he says it's probably because e-cigarettes aren't designed as a medical device. They're designed for enjoyment, too. They have this dual use. And America has a long history of saying, oh, you enjoy this thing?

Well, let's try and squash that. Right, exactly. Yeah, but what's the big deal to them, though, really? I think, OK. If it's regulated like tobacco, it's not keeping them from smoking. Oh, to e-cigarette users? Well, yeah, it doesn't prevent them from doing anything.

Is it because you have to be 18 or something? I don't know. I think there seems to be a bit of a culture war going on with between e-cigarette users and manufacturers, too. And the anti-tobacco warriors that were very successful. To get this from the 60s to today, there was a drop from, I think, 40% of Americans smoked in 1965.

18% smoke as of 2015 or 16. It's pretty amazing. It's a great drop. In numbers, it's actually not that big of a drop because the population kept growing. So it was really just an 8 million American drop. But it shows the social trend of people saying, we don't smoke anymore.

Smoking is for losers, right? So that was the result of years, decades of government PSAs and the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association and the Long Association all getting together and just pumping and drumming it into the heads of Americans that smoking is stupid. It's a betrayal to your family. It's a waste of money.

You're killing yourself. You're affecting the insurance industry. You're crippling America with your stupid habit. And it worked. Now, if e-cigarettes are OK, they have to walk that back some. And the people who are still trying to get America to be totally smoke-free are like, we're not about to do that.

But they don't, though. That's that confusion between burning tobacco and ingesting nicotine like you would gum. Right. You know, it's a stigma because it looks like a cigarette. Partially. But also remember that nicotine is most addictive when it's inhaled.

When you chew it as a gum or get it through a patch, it's supposedly not addictive at all. It's only when you inhale it that it's addictive. So they're also saying, this is a drug and people are doing drugs, so it should be regulated. But then other people say, well, caffeine is a drug. Why don't we regulate that? And Starbucks is like, shut your mouth.

Should we take another break? Sure. All right. We'll come back and we'll talk about that Rolling Stone article in a very interesting study from a few years ago, right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And it's like it's a shock.

All right, so in that Rolling Stone magazine, there was a very big time study that came out of Britain. In August 2015, they called a landmark review of ESIGs. And they said, quote, around 95% safer than smoking, which is, that's a bold statement. It is. And I went and looked today to see how much that's changed. They have doubled and tripled down on that number.

If you go onto the UK's government health service, the NHS site, they say it's about 95% safer than smoking still. I saw a 97% somewhere. And this is like the Royal College of Surgeons saying this. So it's very much touted as an alternative to tobacco, safer alternative to tobacco. So here's the deal, though. It seems like people in this article,

even that take issue with the 95% number, say it may not be 95%, but it is certainly better than burning tar into your lungs. Well, yeah, and those are the Americans, though. The Americans are saying, we're never going to say it's 95% safer. But apparently, most public health people in America say it's almost certainly safer than cigarettes.

Like you said, just that combustion alone creates some really bad stuff that you're not going to get from vapor just because there's no combustion. So just by that alone would make e-cigarettes safer than tobacco. But the question is, I think a lot of people have this idea that, oh, I can just totally vape to my heart's content. It's healthy even.

It's like huffing vitamin C or something like that. That doesn't seem to be the case from recent research. Yeah, and it says too here that, and this may be because of the American propaganda machine, but said 84% of smokers believed e-cigs were safer in 2010. And just three years later, that dropped to 63%. Yeah, and there was another stat. I think, I don't know if it was in that or another article,

but they said that something like a third of former e-cig smokers said they went back to tobacco because they were worried about the health dangers of e-cigarettes. Now, that's a problem. Yeah, that's ridiculous. The people who are saying, no, e-cigs are safer than tobacco.

And what you're talking about at base are nicotine addicts. Right. So this nicotine delivery system, over this nicotine delivery system, if it's even a little healthier. Right. You know? And America is saying, absolutely not.

We're not doing that. In our eyes, they're one in the same tobacco and e-cigarettes. So some people are saying, well, there's blood on your hands. The blood of 480,000 Americans who die from smoking every year, from smoking tobacco. Right. That's the stakes to all this. But nicotine itself, and this is in that Rolling Stone

article, too, is super interesting. Do we do want a nicotine or just, I know we did quite a few on smoking. We do want caffeine. Back in the day. But nicotine is interesting in that it is, apparently, if it's not smoked, and if you remove it from that cigarette, then it's fairly benign as a substance itself.

Right. Although addictive, as far as what it does to the body. But the weird thing is, is that it doesn't do the same thing. Like, it's sort of like this little magic. And that's why people smoke, probably. This little magic thing. If you need to feel up, and your body wants to feel up, a cigarette can make you feel up.

Right. But if you want to chill out and relax, it can also do that. Right. So it has some pharmacological. Magic? Yeah, to it, which makes it useful. But it's also, again, as that article was pointing out, it's been stigmatized ever since the 70s in that change

and paradigm of what smoking is. Yeah. It came about, and nicotine got targeted. So let's talk about some of these, some of the things that have been found. Because one of the big problems, also, a big objection to just allowing e-cigarettes smoked anywhere, people vaping wherever they want,

is that, one, we don't know very much about it. But two, if we say, OK, maybe smoking's not so bad. If you're not actually smoking, you're just vaping. Right. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it is on par with drinking or coffee or whatever. And teens start to take this up. And they are.

They are. The problem is, is a lot of people say, well, OK, we're turning our teens into nicotine addicts. I have a problem with that. But what if this whole vaping thing goes away, and we've got all these teenage nicotine addicts, do you really think they're not going to just start smoking cigarettes after that?

Right, or just do that anyway. Right. Apparently, that's not necessarily happening. That teens who are, I feel like such an old guy saying the word teens. Try saying tweens. Tweens. Feel really old.

Oh, that feels terrible. That teens and tweens, that when they are trying this, they're trying it. Most of them are deciding it's not for them, and they're not going on to tobacco, actually. Well, you're right, because they did a study, the CDC did one, that E-SIG use had tripled in the past year among middle and high school students.

But then you poke into the study, and it doesn't differentiate at all between someone who just tried it once, waiting for the school bus, and a kid who really took it up. So it's so funny that after depressing that after all these years, there's still such bad studies. Well, bad reporting on the studies. I saw that the CDC says that e-cigarette smoking is down

2015 to 2016. 16% of teenagers had smoked or vaped in the last 30 days in 2015. It was down to 11.3% in 2016. And apparently smoking tobacco is holding steady at 8%. But like 7% smoke cigars, which is hilarious. Remember that cartoon baby that was like a bank robber who smoked cigars on the Bugs Bunny?

On the Bugs Bunny, you know the tweens love that. I did see on some weird link researching all this, that very sad kid, I think he was like Indonesian, that was a two-year-old smoker. Oh, no, what happened? It was a follow-up. He doesn't smoke now. But then he had a lot of weight gain,

but it seems like now he's doing OK. But I hated that people laughed and thought that was funny. Oh, it was disturbing. It was completely disturbing. Yeah, like a baby. He could barely hold his head up and he was smoking. I know. And here we are laughing, but not from that.

Sure. It's laughing at how I said baby. Exactly. So where are the chemicals coming from then? If they're not smoking tobacco, what's the problem? Well, I mean, some of it is from the flavoring, right? The flavoring, yeah. Like 75% of the, this is a Harvard study.

75% of the flavored e-cigs contain that. I think that's when you said diacetyl? That was a different one. Oh, that's the popcorn flavor. Right, popcorn log. Yeah, butter flavored. And that was, I mean, we're not saying it tastes like that, but it is a chemical used in artificial butter.

And back in the early 2000s, that was when we heard the term popcorn, popcorn lung. Right. Well, actually, they do use it as a buttery flavor in whenever you have a buttery flavored e-cig or vape. Right. Right, so this, what did you call it, diacetyl? Popcorn, yeah.

Yeah, diacetyl. Popcorn lung is, like you said, it came from the early 2000s where people who worked in microwave popcorn plants were coming down with this irreversible scarring of the lungs in a cough they couldn't kick. And it was from this molecule, from inhaling the molecule. Well, it turns out the amount of diacetyl that's found in even cigarettes, let alone e-cigarettes,

is not nearly enough to give you popcorn lung. Right, but like you said, it's a bad reporting that doesn't keep someone like our own beloved Mother Jones even from saying headlines like flavored e-cigs may be worse than nicotine. I saw also that some other fruity flavors in a recent study found that fruity flavors tended to be particularly toxic. Yeah.

And I can't remember what the chemical was. And then cinnamon, vanilla, and buttery all had bad reactions with white blood cells that they think might promote lung tissue damage in the long run. It just seems so gross to me. So that's why if you're not smoking with nicotine and you're still inhaling all these chemicals for nothing, I'm going to double down.

You're a dummy. Well, the FDA, and this is a big deal, in April, I think this was a couple of years ago, they released these regulations, one of which said that in order to get it passed through, each skew is what it's called in the biz. Not just this business, but if you have a retail shop, like every little thing you sell is called a skew.

Each skew had to be approved. And that means every single flavor is a different skew. And the dude did the math, and he was like, we have 240 skews, $100 an hour, $5 million per skew. And he's like billions of dollars, basically, to get all these stupid flavors approved. Right. Now that the FDA has come in, right?

Yeah. And what this guy was saying was, we have spent decades trying to get the tobacco companies, stripped the power from them. And now that e-cigarettes are a thing, and now they're being regulated, you just gutted out the independent businesses, which left Big Tobacco this huge vacuum to come in and be like,

OK, here are your e-cigarettes courtesy of us, Big Tobacco. Are they doing that already? We've been screwing you over for decades. Yeah. So they're making e-cigs now? Yeah. I believe Altria, who makes Marlboro, came out with the Mark 10 almost immediately,

once they hit the US in 2007 or 2008. I'm surprised Big Tobacco hasn't gotten in on the cannabis thing. I can't believe they're not. Because cannabis vaping is a big thing now, too. Yeah. Well, that guy in the Rolling Stone article was saying a lot of his colleagues

are being like, forget nicotine. I'm going over to cannabis. It's less regulated. Really? Basically, I'm paraphrasing here. That's funny, though. You got anything else? Well, just that last study, we never finally

said the results at UCSF's Division of Adolescent Medicine. They tested 67 teens who vape compared to 16s who vape and smoke, and 20 who did not do either. And of course, they found out that if you do both, it's a lot higher. If you vape, it's still high. If you don't do anything, then you're fine. Right.

It's kind of a no-duh study. Apparently, also, some of the, depending on what chemicals, like formaldehyde can really come out of the flavorings or the vegetable glycerin, or the propylene glycol, I think, or reactions between these things. But it's also very temperature dependent. At higher temperatures, they can create some really toxic stuff.

But at lower temperatures, you can inhale the same stuff and those chemicals are not created. But if you're blowing fat clouds, you're probably at a higher temperature. Is that how they do that? Yeah. So you are probably getting the worst of the worst chemicals that your cartridge has to offer.

Yeah. I think a lot of those pins, you can vary the temp, depending on what you want to get out of it. Right, after a certain price point, I would guess. And then lastly, one other thing. That whole jazz about how you're just exhaling water vapor, that is almost certainly not the case. So you're exhaling some of those chemicals?

Yeah. Right into your cubicle neighbor's face. I mean, at the very least, it's not like, oh, we should be able to do this in movie theaters and restaurants, because it's not smoke. Right. It's still obnoxious. Sure.

You look like a dope. Yeah, with that flannel tied around your waist. Boy, we're going to hear from vapors. They're going to be mad. If you want to know more about vaping, read about this. Don't go take it up. That was another problem that people were saying is like, if it's touted as harmless or whatever,

people might be like, well, I was putting off smoking, because I didn't want to die, but maybe I'll try this vaping thing. Right. Don't do that. Just go read about it, figure out what you think about it, and then don't vape, or smoke, says I. And in the meantime, it's time for listening now.

You can call this a sea monkey follow-up. Oh, yeah, good. We love that episode. That was a great one. Hey, guys, just listen to Sea Monkeys. As a young reporter with a local newspaper, I interviewed Yolanda at her home in Bryan's Road, Maryland. That was the widow of the inventor of sea monkeys.

Right. She wrote a children's book, and I was doing a story about it. It was about animals, by the way, not sea monkeys. I remember her giving me a giant bottle of Evian water and the best vegan pumpkin chocolate chip cookies ever. That sounds good. She was a devoted animal lover and one of those people who would feed wildlife and deer that

wandered onto her property, leading them to overrun the surrounding neighborhood. She also filled me in on the sea monkey saga and gave me a t-shirt and other sea monkey merchandise. I gave the sea monkeys and tank to my friend, who kept them alive, on her office desk for years. There are always rumors about Von Braunhut having a Nazi flag displayed on their house.

But he was long dead by the time I met Yolanda. The house was shabby, but the ruins I had, I saw had a comfortable vibe, shabby, comfy. And she was very kind to me, and you couldn't help, but feel sorry for her. I love the podcast. Sarah. Thanks a lot, Sarah.

That's pretty good. I love follow-ups like that, where it's like, hey, this thing you talked about, here's an extra little peek that you didn't know. That's right. Peek. Well, if you want to give us a peek, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh M. Clark and at SYSK Podcast.

I also have a website called ruceriosclark.com. You can get to Chuck on Facebook at facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's also a slash Stuff You Should Know Facebook page. You can send all of us, including Jerry and E-mail, to self-podcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say.

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