Brain Top Off!

In only a few short years, electronic cigarettes have moved from an obscure gadget for smoking enthusiasts to the leading tobacco alternative and smoking harm reduction tool. The formula of the device has such an elegant simplicity that it makes one wonder why it did not exist decades ago – it’s just a power source that feeds a heating element, which in turn vaporizes a nicotine solution.

E-liquid v Tobacco

The hardware is varied and eclectic, from the batteries to the heating elements. This hardware has a palpable effect on the quality of the vapor, but the main ingredient in the electronic cigarette recipe is and always will be the nicotine solution, also called e-liquid.

In terms of harm done to the user’s body, traditional tobacco is the clear loser. It has a highly toxic mixture of roughly 4,000 toxic chemicals and 50 known carcinogens, including arsenic, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and the sticky, solid particulate known as tar. And that is just the ingredients in tobacco; as any firefighter will confirm, inhaling the carbon monoxide produced by the combustion alone can have rather serious long term health effects.

E-liquid, on the other hand, includes a very short list of ingredients: water, food-grade flavoring, pharmaceutical-grade nicotine and an FDA approved glycerol to create the illusion of smoke – usually vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol or a mixture of both. Both glycerols have been tested for human inhalation since the 1940’s and propylene glycol is widely used in asthma inhalers and hospital cleaning due to its antimicrobial and fungicidal properties.

Nicotine has been widely researched as well, and most researchers agree that, while extremely addictive, it is a mostly safe alkaloid with about the same toxicity as caffeine. Indeed, nicotine has also been found to help patients with depression, Alzheimer’s, low blood pressure and ADHD to name a few.

Even the highly controversial study performed by the FDA, which is highly quoted by opponents of electronic cigarettes, found that beyond barely detectable trace amounts of antifreeze in one of the cartridges (later verified to be a manufacturing fault in the plastic), all the toxicity found in the eliquid was 8ng/g of nitrosamines (carcinogens), an amount too low to be considered harmful and comparable to the amount of nitrosamines found in the FDA approved nicotine patch. Later that year, Health New Zealand performed another study on the mist produced by e-liquid confirming those findings, and declaring that “inhaling mist from the e-cigarette is rated several orders of magnitude (100 to 1000 times) less dangerous than smoking tobacco cigarettes”.

While electronic cigarettes do an outstanding job at reproducing the physical act of smoking, however, they do still have a few shortcomings to overcome. Amongst all its harmful chemicals, tobacco also has alkaloids other than nicotine. Chief among them are beta-carboline alkaloids which, among other things, act as moniamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI’s). In layman’s terms, these MAOI’s balance the stimulant effects of nicotine to create the calming, soothing and almost sedative effect most smokers are familiar with.

The lack of these extra alkaloids is believed to be the main reason some smokers do not complete the switch to electronic cigarettes. Recently, however, some laboratories have started experimenting with what they call “Whole Tobacco Alkaloid” e-liquids, and once the pharmacology, recipes and effects are perfected, there will be no conceivable reason to think smoking combustible cigarettes is better than the electronic alternative.

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