I dont doubt given an equal amount of vaping to equal amount of smoking, vaping is far healthier. But to what end? Is smoking 1 cigarette a day worse than vaping 2-3ml of 50mg/ml nicotine? How about 3-4?
Also I don't think that there are many people that overdose nicotine regularily because it causes nausea and dizziness so people are normally self-regulating the nicotine dose automatically. So the scenario you are proposing doesn't seem to be something we can actually observe as a common consumption pattern.
Too much nicotine is far closer to drinking too much coffee than to smoking and has similar acute effects which is why almost nobody does it on a regular basis.
It's not really the nicotine that causes the obvious damage though. Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease
On top of that it’s obvious that what goes into the lungs generally stays in the lungs, and vapes are full of all sorts of weird flavours and e numbers
But the truth is even if you were vaping water all day it would likely still damage your cardiovascular system
nobody claimed otherwise
> Studies have shown that the vape smoke stimulates the vagus nerve which causes changes in the cardiovascular system that could likely cause heart disease
Can you name this study? Are you talking about "E-cigarettes and their lone constituents induce cardiac arrhythmia and conduction defects in mice"? This study did not find what you claim. All it found is that in mice the heart rhythm during and right after exposure increased. This is far from claiming that it "could likely cause heart disease" in humans. Also human switching studies point the other way. smokers who move to vaping show improvements in blood vessel function within weeks. I don't know why people really need to twist study results to depict vaping more harmful than it is. Yes, it is not healthy and you shouldn't do it. But all scientific evidence conclusively points to vaping, even heavy vaping, still being way less harmful than smoking because we already know that basically all harm comes from inhaling the residues of combustion, not from the nicotine. Condeming vaping as being equally bad as smoking is irresponsible and unscientific and prevents proven harm reduction for heavy smokers.
I never said this did I.
Also you’re talking about smokers moving to vaping, whereas at the moment plenty of people are going straight to vaping due to people over arguing how harmless it is compared to smoking.
Even when we don't have the numbers for everyday long-term use we already know the chemical and biological mechanisms that make smoking so harmful and carcinogen and we can measure that these substances are almost entirely absent in vapor during normal use of a vape because almost all of the problems with smoking come from burning tabacco and inhaling the fumes and vaping is simply way cooler and there is no fume but vapor (hence the name) and we know that the potential of vapor to do harm is way lower than fume. We never have any long-term data for anything new. But to make an argument for not consuming something you would at least have some reasonable mechanism through which it could be harmful and a lot of those known to be harmful mechanisms are present when smoking but absent when vaping. Even the British National Health Service agrees that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking and this is a reasonable position.
> Trading the terrible effects of burning tobacco versus the insane amount of nicotine from vaping seems like an unknown tradeoff to me
This is just black rhetoric that is not evidence-based. How do you know the amount of nicotine is "insane" during normal use?
All available evidence points to vaping being at least one magnitude less harmful than smoking and this is backed by what we know about chemical and biological processes of the chemicals involved and through medical reports about people who replaced smoking with vaping. It would be irresponsible to deny smokers who can't quit a way to harm reduction just by claiming we don't have any long-term data. We know enough about combustion, vapor and the chemical and biological implications to be quite confident that vaping is much less harmful than smoking.
That doesn't mean we should promote it to anybody who is not already a smoker. But as a means to reduce harm for someone who seems unable to quit smoking it should be considered.