To tell those who lecture me on vaping to Fuck Off

[Dogsitterwoes]

AIBU. No, let them lecture you
YANBU - Yes, be rude to them

I'm in my 50s and was a long term smoker. I switched to vaping in January. I am considerate and only vape outdoors and move away from other people or into a smoking area. People sometimes
comment, there's a brief convo around my giving up smoking, and 9 out of 10 respond nicely in a 'well done you' kind of way.

The 1 out of 10 though start lecturing me on the evils of vaping. These can be complete strangers, or acquaintances. They go on and on.
Usual themes:

1. Just as bad for you or worse for you than smoking.
2. Children are vaping.
3. Environmental impact of disposables.

I respond politely. I acknowledge there is a concern around all of this, and
1 - I know they aren't exactly good for me but I think they are not as bad as cigarettes, and it's my intension to also stop vaping this year
2 - I agree the manufacturer's should stop targeting non-smokers with the sweet flavours
3 - I agree, I use a rechargeable, but there's probably a lot more all of us could be doing for the environment.

But they do not let it drop. I've literally been lectured at on and on.

YANBU to stop being polite after my initial response and tell them that if I stopped vaping today, I'd be back on the fags tomorrow so mind their own fucking business?

Sorry it was sky news that's why.

https://youtube.com/@SkyNews

@Mybusyday no you don't NEED to find evidence, but you keep banging on about it and we've repeatedly asked if you can show us it but you don't, so we can only presume there's none out there 🤷‍♀️

You can presume all you like, I don’t care

@OneTC lol, like roll ups but hi-tech? I have learned something, and I haven’t even RTFT..

I don't have time to trawl the entirety of Sky News' YT channel - can you narrow it down a bit?

Vaping clouds are not nice to walk through and vaping evangelists and ‘communities’ are irritating. But in no way is it as bad as smoking. We should all be happy that fewer people smoke. When you go to Europe and people still smoke indoors, you remember how disgusting it was.

I hope it fades out of fashion with kids. At my teens’ school, it is the privileged try-hard kids from wealthy families who start to vape. They suck on these adult dummies vapes in order to attempt to look ‘cool’. They are viewed with derision rather than admiration so it’s definitely not aspirational for all kids. We need someone like Sunak to start vaping. That would work more then any public health campaign ;-)

Anyway smoking cigarettes is terrible for health. Even if vapes are only 10% safer, that is still progress.

I don’t need to ‘find’ any evidence,,, unlike you
@Mybusyday you claim you have evidence but refuse to share. If it's as devastating as you claim then surely you'd be share, at the best least pop a link in one of your posts and we will gladly take a look.

However many, many other posters have added links and information that you have not had the decency to look at or acknowledge.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-funded-studies-show-damaging-effects-vaping-smoking-blood-vessels
Literally too many links and articles to post here but this may be of interest. Also the work of Mike Jones may interest you - although probably not

Surely vaping attracts more young people than cigarettes ever did because of all the different flavours, its more pernicious

Thank you for engaging.

I will give this proper attention tomorrow but from what I have read so far of the first study (on humans) I can immediately see one glaring methodological flaw:

Here is the study:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ATVBAHA.121.317749

They link to a supplement with further details of inclusion and exclusion criteria:

https://www.ahajournals.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1161%2FATVBAHA.121.317749&file=ATVB_ATVB-2022-317749-T_supp1.pdf

The authors say that the smoker group only smoked and did not vape, the vaper group only vaped and did not smoke, the non-smoker group did neither.

However:

To be included as a non-smoker, participants had to have not smoked in the past five years.

To be included as a vaper, participants only needed to be a current non-smoker and to have vaped for at least three months. They could have been on 30 a day until then, or even more recently, as long as they had stopped smoking by the time they were recruited.

If you are trying to assess the chronic effects of smoking versus vaping versus neither then how on earth can these inclusion criteria show you what you are looking for?

I'll look at these two studies properly tomorrow - they seem to have thrown the kitchen sink at it - but on a quick read through the article you linked, there's nothing in there that would suggest PHE should revise their estimate that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking.

I am happy to hear what 'Mike Jones' has to say but it turns out it's a very common name and I'm struggling to find his stuff. Do you have a link?

What do these studies show, in your opinion, beyond what it says in the headline?

The latest UK stats on young people and vaping are here:

https://ash.org.uk/media-centre/news/press-releases/experimental-child-vaping-up-significantly-since-2022-but-not-current-vaping

More children are trying them once or twice but there is no huge increase in regular users. There is not some whole new epidemic of addiction.

Disposables are a problem because children can afford them. Big colourful displays and posters in corner shops are a problem because they're attractive and eye catching. But the biggest problem is lack of enforcement on illegal sales. Whatever new bans you think you want, you'll run into the same problem unless enforcement is sorted out. A good example is Australia where you now need a prescription to buy nicotine vape products. As a result, almost 90% of adult vapers in Australia now just buy black market unregulated products.

https://theconversation.com/how-bad-is-vaping-and-should-it-be-banned-197913

Flavours are not the problem. Almost as many children smoke as vape regularly and every single one of them is smoking tobacco flavoured cigarettes.

OTOH, flavours are one of the most important factors in the effectiveness of vaping as a way to stop smoking. Flavours help distance the new vaper from their old habit and provide huge encouragement as ex-smokers rediscover their sense of taste and smell.

If you think flavours are the problem do you you think nicotine gum should only come in fag flavour or can you see how mint or fruit flavours might be helpful?

To be clear, the vast majority of black market products are no more dangerous than legally sold products, they just comply with the regs of some other country and not the country of import. The ingredients in nicotine vapes are all really cheap and basic so there's not much incentive to cut corners.

But the fact there's a thriving black market means there are no checks to prevent actually dangerous products being sold and I'm sure it happens occasionally.

I just read the second study on rats 😬

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/ATVBAHA.122.318051

They took 56 rats, anaesthetised them with ketamin and exposed a group of 8 rats to each of the following:

High nicotine, menthol cigarette smoke
Low nicotine, menthol cigarette smoke
High nicotine, non-menthol cigarette smoke
Low nicotine, non-menthol cigarette smoke
acrolein and aldehyde at levels equivalent to second hand smoke
'Inert' ultrafine particles (carbon)
Clean air

Then they took another 56 rats and operated on them to sever their entire vagus nerve at the neck, then divided them into groups of 8 and repeated the above exposures.

Then they took another group of 56 rats and performed sham vagus nerve surgery (same operation except for actually cutting the nerve), and exposed in groups of 8 as above.

Before and after each group's exposure, the rats' endothelial function was tested using 'flow-mediated dilatation' (FMD) which is a test using ultrasound to measure the dilation or constriction of blood vessels.

Then they killed all the rats, wrote up their results and made some really bogus conclusions.

This study has nothing to do with vaping despite attempts to shoehorn it in by the authors (because funding). They claim it's relevant because acrolein, aldehyde and ultrafine particles are found in both cigarette smoke and vapour from ecigs. Technically they are correct, however:

Acrolein and aldehyde
we have known for a long time that products of burning such as acrolein and aldehydes are present in much, much lower levels in vapes than they are in tobacco smoke, to the extent that they are completely undetectable in second hand vape. These chemicals only really show up at all in studies where they have misused a vape by firing it at an unsuitable temperature or puff regime. Burnt vape always tastes nasty and vapers avoid it. Experiments that throw up large quantities of these chemicals invariably fail badly at replicating real world conditions.

PHE have always assessed all studies on these chemicals related to vaping and have included commentary on the least shit ones in their yearly evidence updates. This forms part of their estimated 5% residual risk of vaping compared with smoking.

Ultrafine particles
Not all ultrafine particles are the same. In particular, solid and liquid particles behave very differently. UFPs from vaping are liquids, UFPs from smoking are solids. This study uses 'inert' carbon nanoparticles. They may be chemically inert but they are still physically solids and behave as such in this physical world and in our physical lungs. This study cannot tell us anything about the behaviour of liquid ultrafine particles such as those produced by vaping (or having a shower or boiling a kettle). They have just extrapolated from the ultrafine particles in cigarette smoke, which are solids (soot, basically) and claimed this also applies to vaping. It does not.

But it gets worse.

This is their stated goal:

The goal of this project was to determine why a growing number of inhaled tobacco and marijuana products, including combustible products, dry heat vaporizer and heated tobacco products, and e-cigarettes, all acutely impair endothelial function despite fundamental differences in the products.

Their study provides no insight into any of this. Their only valid conclusion is that severing the entire vagus nerve prevents what they call 'endothelial dysfunction' and what the rest of us call 'the normal thing that happens when you drink a cup of coffee.'

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15799717/

No shit. We know the vagus nerve serves an important function in our brain's communication with our heart and circulatory system, among many other functions. Severing the vagus nerve is not good for you. We evolved it for many good reasons. I am sure that actual clinicians who see patients with vagus nerve damage are already aware of their patients' symptoms, including FMD results, and can advise accordingly.

I count 168 rats' lives in this experiment. I am not averse to animal experimentation when it has the potential to produce important findings that improve human health but this was always only ever a bullshit study. It was never going to tell us anything new.

Frankly, those 168 little guys' lives would have been better sacrificed giving us a new, better mascara.

I only just noticed that one of the authors on the rat study is Stanton Glantz. We know all about him.

https://undark.org/2021/08/02/here-comes-trouble-anti-tobacco-heroes-legacy/

Men like Glantz and most of the rest in 'tobacco control' want to destroy the tobacco industry at all costs. Even at the cost of smokers' and ex-smokers' lives. That's what they're about, not public health. They don't measure success by how many lives are saved, they measure success by how loudly the tobacco industry screams.

Google 'Master Settlement Agreement' if you want to know where the money comes from for all these bullshit US rat and tissue studies. Don't expect any honest declarations of interests. Tobacco industry MSA funding is laundered through several US government departments before it lands on the desks of men like Glantz in the form of tobacco control research grants.

This is a very luctrative proxy war being fought between tobacco control and big tobacco over the bodies of smokers and ex smokers, who are completely forgotten. We're not even foot soldiers, we're just the mud these two extremely well funded adversaries trample through on their way to battle each other.

Of course they hate vapers, we stuck two fingers up to the lot of them and stopped funding their proxy war.

Don’t want to get all fan-girl on you but I really enjoyed reading this critique of that study! Do you mind if I ask what you do for a living?!

Amazing post!
We have rats as pets and they are the most inquisitive, friendly little souls. The things human beings will do to animals like this in the name of research astounds and saddens me 😥
I agree, this 'research' uncovered nothing new and those poor animals would have been better sacrificed for some bloody cosmetics.

Well done on giving up cigarettes, that's got to be good for your long term health! Regarding vaping, while I do find it the lesser of the evils, when compared to smoking, I still really don't enjoy people doing it around me, partly because those things can still smell pretty nauseating (yes, I know other things such as perfume etc do that too, before anyone jumps in). We also don't really know the long term implications of vaping either, plus there is potentially a lot of plastic waste. I wouldn't randomly offer you these opinions, of course, but I would move away from you vaping, and if you were my friend I'd be honest with you too. Again, well done for stopping smoking though, and perhaps in the longer term you might want to look into ways to stop vaping too! Good luck if you choose to go down that route!

Thank you. I don't do anything related to this, I've just seen so many of these poor studies over the past decade. The same kind of flaws cycle round again and again if you watch long enough.

Just got back from a trip abroad. The airport had a fantastic idea. I think they labelled it the 'Camel Room'. I think because it was sponsored by Camel cigarettes.

A glass box about the size of a large bedroom where all the smokers and vapers go inside and harm themselves. What a brilliant idea. It was like going to the zoo seeing these people looking like puff the magic dragon whilst not effecting anyone who didnt smoke/vape. They did their thing whilst smiling and chatting away. I had absolutely no issues with them vaping/smoking till their hearts content.

See us anti vapour people arent unreasonable. Vape as much as you like, just dont inflict it on others please.

But you are being unreasonable in your post? Describing it as ‘like seeing them in a zoo’?

Also - RTFT. The effect of making people who vape share a space with people who smoke is not a very good idea for numerous reasons.
Vaping shouldn’t be allowed inside around the general population, but vapers shouldn’t be lumped in with smokers either.

Went to a wedding thus wedding and a woman got out a mini vape thing at the table and kept semi surreptitiously puffing on it whilst we were eating! The whole table kept side eyeing each other and in true British fashion nothing was said.

Yeah those little boxes are a god send on long haul transfers! you don't even really need your own cigs you can just go in there and breathe for a while 😅