Which Is More Harmful: E-Cigarettes or Regular Cigarettes?

In fact, the answer to this question is still very clear. Smoking harms the body. From the perspective of harm, e-cigarettes are less harmful than regular cigarettes. This is also an important reason why e-cigarettes are used for the first time as an alternative to regular cigarettes to treat smoking addiction. The so-called lesser of two evils.

So, some friends may wonder, why are e-cigarettes less harmful than regular cigarettes? There are two major differences between e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes in terms of harm: the tobacco components and the method of vaporization. Let's discuss this in detail today.

1. From the perspective of components, e-cigarettes are far less harmful than regular cigarettes.

Tar
 
The most harmful component of regular cigarettes is tar, which refers to the brown greasy substance that remains on the cigarette tip during smoking, commonly known as cigarette oil. One of the most intuitive changes during smoking is that the filter gradually darkens as it absorbs smoke, and the fingers holding the cigarette also become dull, and of course, teeth get stained after smoking.

Tar not only changes color. In fact, it is a product of organic matter that is incompletely burned under oxygen-deficient conditions. Therefore, it contains many substances, many of which are carcinogenic, such as benzo[a]pyrene, cadmium, arsenic, beta-carboline, amines, nitrosamines, and other carcinogenic substances, as well as phenols, fumaric acid, and other carcinogenic substances.

Because of this, regular tobacco leaves have become classified as carcinogenic substances by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer, meaning they are established carcinogens. In addition, tar can accelerate the fragility of blood vessels, leading to vascular hardening and loss of elasticity, causing cardiovascular diseases, and many other diseases are also caused by tar, which is why many doctors' first recommendation for various diseases is to quit smoking.

So is tar unsolvable? The answer is basically affirmative; tar is unsolvable. Many people have become tobacco academicians based on reducing tar and have faced a lot of resistance, including hundreds of academicians jointly writing to the government to demand the revocation of their qualifications. Yang Gonghuan, head of the National Tobacco Control Office, expressed that the tobacco "harm reduction and tar reduction" method is an effective deception. Scientific research in various countries has shown that "low nicotine" is not "low harm," and the idea of "low tar and harm reduction" for slim cigarettes is itself a false proposition; all the "results" of this work are untenable. Moreover, the adverse effects of low nicotine lead to a larger scale of smoking, ultimately worsening harm.

So do e-cigarettes contain tar? The answer is no; one of the biggest advantages of e-cigarettes is that they do not contain tar, but instead use safe VG (vegetable glycerin) and PG (propylene glycol) as substitutes. Both are common organic solvents, and you can see these two ingredients in skincare products; they are very safe ingredients, and at least currently, there is not enough evidence to suggest they are harmful.

Nicotine

Nicotine is another important component in tobacco and is well-known as a tobacco component. Nicotine is often referred to as nicotine. Its physiological harm is not as severe as cigarette tar, but nicotine has a very troublesome issue: addiction. Nicotine can lead to addiction, which is why it is difficult for smokers to quit. In this regard, both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes contain nicotine. However, there are still differences because the nicotine in regular tobacco is contained within the tobacco itself, a product secreted during the growth of tobacco, so reducing nicotine in regular tobacco is a very difficult issue (because tobacco is a physical processing process, nicotine does not decrease; if chemical methods are used to reduce nicotine, it will inevitably change the flavor of the tobacco, affecting tobacco sales). In contrast, e-cigarettes can control the proportion of nicotine since it is added directly, and it can even achieve 0 nicotine.

Of course, some may recall that during this year's 315 event, CCTV mentioned that e-cigarettes had excessive formaldehyde. I actually wrote a rebuttal at that time because CCTV's statement compared e-cigarettes to regular air. If we compare e-cigarettes to tobacco, the answer is still that regular cigarettes are more significant; in fact, regular cigarettes produce high concentrations of formaldehyde during combustion, so it has a sense of a wolf questioning a fox.

Moreover, the presence of formaldehyde is mainly due to substandard e-liquid. Of course, there are currently no national standards for e-cigarettes, so only brands recognized by more e-cigarette companies can be chosen when purchasing.

In addition to the above chemical component differences, there is another important difference between regular cigarettes and e-cigarettes: vaporization.

Burning vs. Vaporization

We know that regular cigarettes need to be burned to be inhaled, and the burning process is also when a large number of harmful substances are generated. It is well known that burning is a chemical reaction process; regular tobacco, after burning, produces a large number of substances. Since the burning of tobacco is not uniform, the temperature differences at different locations are significant, which means that the conditions for chemical reactions are also diverse, thus giving rise to many harmful substances, which is one of the main factors of tobacco harm.

E-cigarettes, on the other hand, do not burn but simply heat and vaporize. Generally, e-cigarettes control the vaporization temperature between 250-350°C, and some e-cigarettes can even achieve low-temperature vaporization at 220-250°C, which is much lower than the 700-800°C of regular tobacco, and this greatly reduces the harm of e-cigarettes and lowers the generation of harmful substances, which is another important reason for the low harm of e-cigarettes.

In addition, the generation of particulate matter is also an important factor. In recent years, the impact of haze has made us pay more attention to environmental protection and health, and we have come to understand that there is a substance called suspended particles, which are very harmful, such as the typical PM2.5, which are particles with a diameter around 2.5μm that can enter the body and cause serious harm, such as cardiovascular diseases. The burning of traditional tobacco produces a large amount of solid suspended particulate matter. The following image shows the contribution of tobacco burning to indoor particulate pollution; we can see that after tobacco consumption, a large amount of particulate matter is produced, with increases of more than ten times from PM1.0 to PM10. These solid particles are inhaled into the body, adhering to the throat, trachea, lungs, etc., and cannot be decomposed. Over the years, this can lead to irreversible diseases such as throat cancer, tracheal cancer, and lung cancer.
 
In contrast, e-cigarettes can also produce particles during vaporization, but these particles are liquid particles that can be absorbed or expelled by the body. For example, the principle of clinical nebulization is based on this; the drugs after nebulization are absorbed by the body. Moreover, the advancement of modern vaporization technology has improved the level of vaporization; for instance, the FEELM from Micvail can achieve 1μm vaporization, which means that the vapor produced does not contain particulate matter in the PM1-PM10 range, and naturally will not cause solid particle damage to individuals.

Of course, the vaporization material itself also significantly affects the harmful substance emissions of e-cigarettes and the vaping experience. The following image shows the development history of e-cigarette vaporization technology, from fiber ropes, organic cotton, stainless steel mesh to today's porous ceramic heating elements, through different stages of development.
 
The improvements in this area not only enhance the vaping experience itself (left image) but also reduce the release of harmful substances from e-cigarettes (right image). For example, porous ceramics have higher thermal conductivity, thus reducing vaporization time.
 
At this point, from an intuitive perspective, we can see that e-cigarettes are much less harmful than regular cigarettes, reflected in:

1. Regular cigarettes have the highly harmful tar, while e-cigarettes do not contain tar.

2. The nicotine content in regular cigarettes is fixed and difficult to eliminate, while the nicotine in e-cigarettes is an added component that can be adjusted to different concentrations.

3. The burning of regular cigarettes produces a large amount of solid particulate matter that cannot be decomposed, such as PM2.5, which adheres to the throat, trachea, lungs, etc., continuously accumulating and causing harm to the body. In contrast, the technology of e-cigarettes produces liquid particles that can be absorbed or expelled by the body, essentially not causing particulate matter harm.

For this reason, the emergence of e-cigarettes serves as a substitute for regular cigarettes. The benefit is that, on one hand, for those who cannot quit smoking, it can reduce the health damage caused by harmful substances like tar in regular cigarettes; on the other hand, the components of e-cigarettes are controllable, such as continuously reducing nicotine content, thereby reducing patients' dependence on nicotine and achieving smoking cessation. Thus, they are used for smoking cessation.
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Of course, that said, whether it is regular tobacco or e-cigarettes, neither is harmless; it is just a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Not smoking is the best option, and we must resolutely stop smoking behaviors among young people, even if it is e-cigarettes.