E-cigarette: Do They Really Help Quit Smoking

Giving up smoking is hard. It’s not just hard like doing laundry is hard, it’s actually really hard. So hard, in fact, that only 7% of people manage to give up smoking through willpower alone. That’s about one success for every twenty quit attempts!

If you live in London, you’ll notice that being a smoker is much tougher than it used to be. Not only are you no longer allowed to smoke in pubs, but you can’t smoke in workplaces anymore or on public transport. Given how dismal the weather is outside, the thought of braving it just for a quick cigarette is sometimes too much to bear.

But there are still nine million smokers in the UK, many of them living in the big cities. Why on earth does anyone still smoke, you ask? Some of them feel that it’s their choice to keep smoking, but most are still smoking just because quitting is hard. Roughly 70% of smokers, nearly three out of four, would like to kick the habit. Remember, even if all nine million smokers tried to give up smoking by going cold turkey, 93% of them would fail — that’s how addictive cigarettes can be!

The other thing that you’ll have noticed recently if you’ve been living in London is the sudden appearance of e-cigarettes. Since about 2013/2014, e-cigarettes users or ‘vapers’ appeared in their thousands, as if from nowhere! While some people think that it’s great that these vapers could give up smoking with the help of their e-cigarettes, others remained suspicious…

Is vaping really any better for your health than smoking? Is vaping just another way for tobacco companies to get us hooked on nicotine? These are all good questions to have, especially if you are thinking of taking up vaping or if you have a friend who vapes.

Looking at the ingredients of an e-cigarette only tells you so much — there’s nicotine (though 0% e-cigarettes are available), flavourings, propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin. This means that vapers aren’t exposed to the most deadly chemicals of tobacco, such as carbon monoxide and tar. But working out exactly how these other chemicals interact with the body is quite a challenge.

Fortunately, I don’t have to do it myself! Public Health England, a government-sponsored group of doctors, analysed all of the evidence we have on e-cigarettes and found them to be 95% less harmful than cigarettes! That’s a huuuge difference, and it means that many lives could be saved if all smokers swapped over right away.

Still, it’s nice to have even more evidence than that, which is why it’s great that the Royal College of Physicians (representing some of the best doctors in the country) also went ahead and did some research on e-cigarettes…. And they also found that e-cigarettes are about 95% less harmful than cigarettes. They also discovered that e-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking and that they are an effective option for someone who wants to quit nicotine altogether.

If you’re interested in how vaping has saved lives, check out the infographic below: