VAPES could be ‘barbecuing your lungs’, a doctor has claimed.
California eye-surgeon Dr Brian Boxer Wachler took to TikTok to warn that vaping could cause damage to your lungs due to their temperature.
Dr Brian Boxer Wachler claimed vapes can barbecue the lungsReuters
In a clip that racked up nearly eight million views, he said: “Vape temperatures can be significantly hotter than cigarette smoke, so vapes literally could be barbecuing your lungs.
“[This could] explain why more younger people who vape need lung transplants versus younger people who smoke cigarettes,” he added.
Dr Brian made these claims off the back of a conversation he had with lung specialist David Weil for his podcast ‘Dr Brian’s Health Show‘.
Speaking on Dr Brian’s podcast, the former director of Stanford’ University’s Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program he’d seen lots of people take up vaping in recent years.
Despite claims that it’s safer than smoking cigarettes, Dr Weill flagged the ‘vast array of chemicals’ emitted by vape oil that enter the lungs.
“Even more than that, it’s a thermal injury,” he claimed. “In other words, it produces very high heat in the lung and the lung is quite sensitive to very high temperatures.”
Dr Weill said vape smoke is actually “much hotter than cigarette smoke”.
His understanding was that vaping was more damaging to the lungs that cigarette smoke, he told his podcast host.
He also claimed that he’s already seeing patients as young as teenagers needing lung transplants because of their e-cig habits.
Despite this, doctors still consider vaping to be safer than smoking.
According to Cancer Research UK (CRUK), e-cigarettes don’t contain cancer-causing tobacco, and most of the toxic chemicals found in cigarettes aren’t in vapes.
It noted that “some potentially harmful chemicals have been found in e-cigarettes, but levels are usually low and generally far lower than in tobacco cigarettes”.
CRUK still encouraged smokers to transition to vaping in order to kick their tobacco habit, which can cause at least 15 different types of cancer – including in the lungs, nose and sinuses, mouth, throat and bowel.
But it said vapes also cause side effects such as throat and mouth irritation, headache, cough and feeling sick.
And according to the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, e-cigs can cause lung injury and even death.
In February 2020, it confirmed 2,807 cases of e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury and 68 deaths attributed to that.
The health watchdog said the risk of lung injury was particularly high to anyone vaping THC, a component of cannabis.
The American Heart Association (AHA) also revealed earlier this year that the combination of nicotine, thickeners, solvents, and flavours in vapes poses a greater risk to heart health than smoking cigarettes.