As pretty much any product that is overtly detrimental to your health, e-cigarettes have seen an increasing number of criticisms lately. Whether it’s because of their marketing strategies, their false safety claims, or just their pretentious nature, e-cigs don’t seem to be given a break. According to a new meta-analysis from the UCSF School of Medicine, e-cigarette users are 28% less likely to quit smoking.
- The products were developed in China and introduced to the US market in 2007
- Over 40 million Americans are cigarette smokers
- One in every five deaths in the United States is related to smoking
- As much as 70% of smokers report that they would like to quit
- E-cigarettes have only started to be looked into by the FDA in the past couple of months
In the largest study ever performed on e-cigarettes, a team of researchers from the University of California San Francisco’s School of Medicine looked at 38 other different studies in order to ascertain how effective e-cigarettes are in helping you quit smoking.
According to the meta-analysis published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine journal, not so much.
By looking at the 38 different previous studies, the team of researchers had an easier time of selecting and pointing out all the references to e-cigarettes being helpful or not in quitting the nasty habit.
After the study was published, one of the researchers behind it went out and said in a release that e-cigarettes should definitely not be recommended as and aid to quitting smoking until they produce evidence that they are actually assisting in what they claim to assist.
Despite the products being tobacco free and the companies producing them claiming that their products are perfectly safe, multiple parties claim to have found evidence that e-cigarettes are actually more harmful than regular cigarettes.
One of the reasons behind this are the ridiculously high levels of formaldehyde found in e-cigarettes, with the carcinogenic substance being found to be 15 times higher in e-cig vapors than in tobacco smoke.
Other studies, however, claim that e-cigarettes are undoubtedly less harmful than regular cigarettes.
This is most likely the cause of companies paying money to have their products come out ahead, so until the FDA actually analyzes the product, we can’t be sure of which of them is more harmful.
What we can be sure of, though, is that both of them are indeed highly damaging to smoke, being responsible for the largest percent of preventable cancers all over the world.
Image source: Wikimedia
Mister Blog Dog says
Good to see unbalanced journalism at its best – NOT! So….here are just a few quotes made by real experts in the addiction field:
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Prof. Peter Hajek, Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), said: “This review is grossly misleading in my opinion.”
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“This review is not scientific. The information included about two studies that I co-authored is either inaccurate or misleading.” – Prof. Ann McNeill, Professor of Tobacco Addiction, National Addiction Centre
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“Publication of this study represents a major failure of the peer review system in this journal.” – Prof. Robert West, Professor of Health Psychology
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Shirley Allen says
Cigarette smoking is an extremely tough practice to break!! I found that smoking is more than just a chemical dependency, it is additionally a mental thing. I tried to quit for over ten years with no success. I attempted the patch, the gum and even hypnosis. None of these things worked for me, in fact when I tried the gum I just ended up with two addictions.
You can just google it for CHARLES JACKSON QUIT SMOKING PROGRAM getting the book that I utilized
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about quitting smoking. Regards