Vaping vs. smoking: What does decades of research tell us?

Tiny Matters

E-cigarettes, commonly referred to as “vapes,” were invented in the early 2000s with the explicit goal of helping people quit smoking by transitioning them to something safer. But there are many people, particularly in the United States, who start vaping without ever having smoked a cigarette, leading to fears that vaping will be an on-ramp to smoking — a “gateway drug.” In fact, in the U.S. alone, nearly half a million middle school students vape. And in 2019, the CDC started receiving reports of severe and acute lung injury in people who vaped. By February of 2020, almost 3,000 people had been hospitalized and 68 people had died.
We know that smoking is deadly (in fact, it’s estimated to take about 10 years off your life), but of course vaping isn’t risk free. In this episode of Tiny Matters, we’ll dive into the science behind both to answer, “What’s more dangerous, smoking or vaping?” “And does vaping actually help people quit smoking cigarettes?” We’ll also get to the bottom of why so many people got sick or died from vaping back in 2019 and 2020, yet we haven’t seen injuries like that since.
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Link to the Tiny Show & Tell story is here. All Tiny Matters transcripts and references are available here.

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1. Vaping vs. smoking: What does decades of research tell us? (00:00:00)

2. How do you test if smoking or vaping is worse? (00:01:26)

3. Comparing toxic exposures in cigarettes vs. vapes (00:04:28)

4. Harm reduction (00:11:03)

5. Tiny show and tell: Seeing through a mouse belly! (00:21:27)