Reaver's Vape Blog # 8 - 0mg has more chemicals than juices with nicotine. Is that true?

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Vape without nicotine in the juice. Someone told me 0mg has more chemicals than juices with nicotine. Is that true?


Insightful answer to the related question supplied courtesy of Andrew Thompson and Quora:
upload_2018-4-16_19-53-58.pngAndrew Thompson,
(a former smoker of 29 years, vaper 3+ years at the time that the response was posted) Answered Nov 12

While what you were told is partially wrong, there is also a weird sort of truth in it. I will explain, but first to clarify some misunderstandings. Everything in e-juice, with or without nicotine, is a chemical. Chemicals are “a distinct compound or substance” as opposed to “poisons” or “toxicants” as most people seem to understand them. True, some chemicals are poisonous or toxic, but others (e.g. pure water) are not, at least not in anything less than huge amounts.

Now, coming back to whether 0 mg e-juice has ‘more chemicals’, technically no. On the other hand, as people reduce the amount of nicotine in their e-juice, which is quite common, they tend to consume a greater volume of juice. E.G. say I normally vape with 12 mg juice, and consume 5ml per day. If I halve the concentration of nicotine in the juice to 6 mg, I’d expect the entire amount I vape, the volume, to rise, to somewhere between 5 and 10 ml of juice per day.

The process behind this comes down to “self-titration” which basically means that you tend to keep vaping till your levels of nicotine are satisfied.

So what’s the danger in that? Well, nicotine, in anything less than huge amounts, is relatively safe with few known side effects (e.g. it is, at worst, a very weak carcinogen - like many things we consume on a daily basis). The propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin that make up the majority of the remaining volume of the e-juice are well known and generally considered safe for human consumption when ingested by mouth. Propylene glycol is also used as the basis of many medicines that are inhaled.

Then we come to the flavourings. Flavourings might contain more variety of chemicals than the other three common ingredients combined. Say each of PG, VG and nicotine are contaminated with trace amounts of 3 other chemicals. That’d add to 12 chemicals in total for the lot of them. On the other hand, a single complex flavouring might contain 50 or more separate chemicals.

I could not name most of them, but some of the chemicals they contain might be Diacetyl or Acetyl Proprionyl. These are both chemicals that are ‘generally recognised as safe’ for use in food flavouring, yet are not safe when it comes to inhalation. Diacetyl for example, has been implicated in the development of Popcorn Lung - a terrible disease that attacks the lungs. The reason it gets the name is because diacetyl is most used in making popcorn, to give it that rich ‘buttery’ flavour. Workers in factories making popcorn were the first to be noted to suffer the disease.

So the end effect of reducing the nicotine in e-liquid is that the vaper might end up consuming a greater volume of chemicals that are potentially dangerous, like diacetyl.

How dangerous? Well to put it in perspective, cigarette smoke also contains diacetyl, yet there has never been a documented case of a smoker suffering popcorn lung, because the overall consumption levels are so low and usually swamped by the toxic effects of other chemicals in the smoke. Even in some of the worst-case scenarios, e-juice that used diacetyl generally provided two orders of magnitude less diacetyl than cigarettes (that’s less than 1% of the potential harm from cigarettes).

A renowned doctor (Konstantinos Farsalinos) who has investigated the chemicals in e-liquid flavourings actually recommends to keep the nicotine content high enough to ensure the overall volume of juice consumed (as well as harmful chemicals that might be in the flavourings) to a minimum.

The e-juice flavoring industry meanwhile, prompted by vapers, has worked hard to find alternatives to chemicals known to cause problems, despite that the risks are very low.

So, while yes, theoretically, dropping the nicotine content can potentially increase your exposure to chemicals that could cause harm:

· We can be confident that even the ones that do happen to be in e-juice, occur at very low levels.

· The vape industry is working hard to remove those chemicals from flavourings completely. (Companies have been known to go bankrupt after it was discovered that their ‘diacetyl free’ flavours actually contained some measurable traces of the substance.)


My recommendation would be not to panic too much about these things, but if you want to be cautious, do what it takes to keep the consumption of volume of e-juice (& therefore flavourings) low. And by ‘what it takes’ I mean to keep the nicotine levels high enough to ensure the volume of mixed vape juice consumed, is as low as practical.
 

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Vape without nicotine in the juice. Someone told me 0mg has more chemicals than juices with nicotine. Is that true?


Insightful answer to the related question supplied courtesy of Andrew Thompson and Quora:
View attachment 129283Andrew Thompson,
(a former smoker of 29 years, vaper 3+ years at the time that the response was posted) Answered Nov 12

While what you were told is partially wrong, there is also a weird sort of truth in it. I will explain, but first to clarify some misunderstandings. Everything in e-juice, with or without nicotine, is a chemical. Chemicals are “a distinct compound or substance” as opposed to “poisons” or “toxicants” as most people seem to understand them. True, some chemicals are poisonous or toxic, but others (e.g. pure water) are not, at least not in anything less than huge amounts.

Now, coming back to whether 0 mg e-juice has ‘more chemicals’, technically no. On the other hand, as people reduce the amount of nicotine in their e-juice, which is quite common, they tend to consume a greater volume of juice. E.G. say I normally vape with 12 mg juice, and consume 5ml per day. If I halve the concentration of nicotine in the juice to 6 mg, I’d expect the entire amount I vape, the volume, to rise, to somewhere between 5 and 10 ml of juice per day.

The process behind this comes down to “self-titration” which basically means that you tend to keep vaping till your levels of nicotine are satisfied.

So what’s the danger in that? Well, nicotine, in anything less than huge amounts, is relatively safe with few known side effects (e.g. it is, at worst, a very weak carcinogen - like many things we consume on a daily basis). The propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin that make up the majority of the remaining volume of the e-juice are well known and generally considered safe for human consumption when ingested by mouth. Propylene glycol is also used as the basis of many medicines that are inhaled.

Then we come to the flavourings. Flavourings might contain more variety of chemicals than the other three common ingredients combined. Say each of PG, VG and nicotine are contaminated with trace amounts of 3 other chemicals. That’d add to 12 chemicals in total for the lot of them. On the other hand, a single complex flavouring might contain 50 or more separate chemicals.

I could not name most of them, but some of the chemicals they contain might be Diacetyl or Acetyl Proprionyl. These are both chemicals that are ‘generally recognised as safe’ for use in food flavouring, yet are not safe when it comes to inhalation. Diacetyl for example, has been implicated in the development of Popcorn Lung - a terrible disease that attacks the lungs. The reason it gets the name is because diacetyl is most used in making popcorn, to give it that rich ‘buttery’ flavour. Workers in factories making popcorn were the first to be noted to suffer the disease.

So the end effect of reducing the nicotine in e-liquid is that the vaper might end up consuming a greater volume of chemicals that are potentially dangerous, like diacetyl.

How dangerous? Well to put it in perspective, cigarette smoke also contains diacetyl, yet there has never been a documented case of a smoker suffering popcorn lung, because the overall consumption levels are so low and usually swamped by the toxic effects of other chemicals in the smoke. Even in some of the worst-case scenarios, e-juice that used diacetyl generally provided two orders of magnitude less diacetyl than cigarettes (that’s less than 1% of the potential harm from cigarettes).

A renowned doctor (Konstantinos Farsalinos) who has investigated the chemicals in e-liquid flavourings actually recommends to keep the nicotine content high enough to ensure the overall volume of juice consumed (as well as harmful chemicals that might be in the flavourings) to a minimum.

The e-juice flavoring industry meanwhile, prompted by vapers, has worked hard to find alternatives to chemicals known to cause problems, despite that the risks are very low.

So, while yes, theoretically, dropping the nicotine content can potentially increase your exposure to chemicals that could cause harm:

· We can be confident that even the ones that do happen to be in e-juice, occur at very low levels.

· The vape industry is working hard to remove those chemicals from flavourings completely. (Companies have been known to go bankrupt after it was discovered that their ‘diacetyl free’ flavours actually contained some measurable traces of the substance.)


My recommendation would be not to panic too much about these things, but if you want to be cautious, do what it takes to keep the consumption of volume of e-juice (& therefore flavourings) low. And by ‘what it takes’ I mean to keep the nicotine levels high enough to ensure the volume of mixed vape juice consumed, is as low as practical.

Great! Now I have no more guilt about the fact that I have increased my nic !
 
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