Walk across any campus or city street, and you will likely see someone using an e-cigarette, or "vape." Promoted as a safer alternative to smoking, vaping has become a global trend, especially among young people. But what does the science actually say? Health organizations, governments, and vaping companies often present conflicting information. This creates a confusing landscape of viral trends and public health concerns. In this lesson, we will learn to clear the air by analyzing different sources, understanding the language of scientific uncertainty, and communicating health information clearly and responsibly.
Starter: Fact, Fiction, or Fog?
Instructions
Work with a partner. Read the three statements below about vaping. Decide if each statement is a Health Fact (supported by strong scientific evidence), a Marketing Claim (used to promote a product), or Under Investigation (scientists don't have a final answer yet). Be ready to explain your thinking.
- Vaping is 100% safe.
- The nicotine in most vapes is highly addictive.
- Vaping is a useful tool to help longtime smokers quit.
Reading: Competing Narratives
Instructions
Your teacher will divide the class into two groups: Group A and Group B. Read your assigned text. As you read, identify three key messages that a young person considering vaping should know. Then, pair up with someone from the other group and compare the messages. How are they different? Why?
Source A: World Health Organization (WHO) Fact Sheet Summary
Electronic cigarettes are devices that heat a liquid to create an aerosol that is inhaled by the user. These liquids almost always contain nicotine, which is highly addictive, as well as other toxic substances that are harmful to users and non-users who are exposed to the aerosols secondhand.
Use of e-cigarettes increases the risk of heart disease and lung disorders. For pregnant women, they pose significant risks to the fetus. For young people, the developing brain is particularly vulnerable to nicotine's effects, which can harm brain development and lead to learning disorders.
While it is claimed that e-cigarettes are a smoking cessation aid, there is not enough evidence to support this. In fact, there is growing evidence that e-cigarette use can lead young people to start smoking traditional cigarettes. The WHO recommends regulations to stop non-smokers from starting to use them.
Source B: An Industry-Funded Consumer Advocacy Article (Summary)
For decades, the world has fought against the harms of combustible tobacco. Today, innovation offers a powerful alternative: vaping. For adult smokers who are unable or unwilling to quit nicotine, switching to e-cigarettes presents a significant opportunity to reduce harm. Public Health England, a major health body, has stated that vaping is at least 95% less harmful than smoking.
While no one claims vaping is without risk, the focus must remain on the millions of lives that could be saved by moving smokers to a less dangerous alternative. Flavors are a key part of this success, as they help adult smokers switch completely. Sensible regulation should focus on keeping these products out of the hands of youth while ensuring they remain an accessible choice for adult smokers.
Banning these products or spreading misinformation only serves to protect the deadly cigarette trade. It's time to embrace harm reduction and the potential of this technology.
Language: Certainty vs. Uncertainty
When discussing public health, how you say something is as important as what you say. Notice how different groups use language to express confidence or caution. This is especially true for an evolving topic like vaping, where long-term effects are still being studied.
Vaping: What You Need to Know
A short, informative video that explains the known risks and common misconceptions about vaping.
Video Transcript
Vaping is kind of amazing. Finally, a less bad alternative to smoking. It delivers one of the most popular drugs in the world: nicotine. It may improve your attention, concentration, memory, reaction time, and endurance. It can reduce anxiety and stress and help you relax and enhance your mood. Nicotine also suppresses hunger, making it easier to maintain or lose weight. And it's simply fun to put a thing in your mouth and get a little kick. [ 00:25 ]
Compared to other stimulants, nicotine's effect doesn't come at the same high price for our bodies. It's also crystal clear that vaping is way, way less harmful than smoking. Smoking delivers hot smoke and extremely toxic particles directly into your lungs, causing serious damage all over your body right away. But we'll purely focus on nicotine vapes in this video. Okay, sure, nicotine is one of the most addictive substances we know, but vaping on its own seems kind of okay. So, is it really that bad if you do it? [ 01:02 ]
Well, we should find out quickly. While in the West, smoking is slowly falling out of fashion, especially among teens, vaping has become a growing epidemic. In 2023 in the UK, 20% of children had tried vaping at least once. In the US, 8% of all students are currently vaping regularly. One in four of them do it daily, and almost all of them use vapes with flavors. So how does vaping work and what does it do to your body? [ 01:28 ]
How does vaping work? A vape is basically a small tank of liquid heated up by a metallic coil that vaporizes it. The major ingredient in most vape juice is propylene glycol and glycerol, the main chemicals in smoke machines, which are also used in countless chemical processes from food like candy and baking mixes to cosmetics, paints, or plastics. Then there are the nicotine salts containing the magic and dozens of different flavor molecules. [ 01:58 ]
When you pull on a vape, the metal coil heats up and turns the liquid into the vapor you inhale. "Vapor" sounds kind of nice, harmless, and pleasant. But vapes don't produce actual vapor but a heated mist of aerosol, a warm, sticky substance made out of large molecules and microscopic particles mixed with air. The best thing to compare it to is inhaling warm body spray. [ 02:21 ]
When you take a hit, billions of aerosol particles cover your mouth and tongue, making you taste pleasant stuff, and enter into your lungs. They reach your alveoli, little air sacs where the breathing happens. Here, the nicotine passes into your bloodstream and is transported into your brain to cause all the pleasant effects. And here, the complications begin. [ 02:41 ]
What's actually in your vape? The scary answer is that we don't really know. Studies found that vape liquids can be thousands of very different mixes of many dozens of substances. The majority were not even mentioned on the label. This seems almost unbelievable, but the vaping industry is much less regulated than you'd think. We know that many official substances in vapes are technically safe, kind of. They're used in cosmetics, medicine, or food and have been extensively tested. Most are safe to eat or put on your skin, but that's not the same as breathing them in. [ 03:20 ]
Cinnamaldehyde, found in cinnamon oil, kills cells and causes genetic damage when inhaled. Benzaldehyde, found in almonds or apples, has a fruity taste and is common in cherry, berry, chocolate, or mint-flavored vapes. As a gas, it irritates the respiratory tract. What's worse is that we don't know what many substances in vape juice do if heated up. The longer you inhale and the hotter the coil gets, the more chemicals in the juice change. Molecules merge or break down, creating new compounds with unknown consequences. [ 03:53 ]
When propylene glycol and glycerol are heated too much, they decompose and turn into harmful molecules. This can happen when the liquid runs out or the coil gets too hot. You'll probably notice this because your vape will taste weird or burnt. If this happens, you should stop right away. And it gets worse. When the metal coil is heated up, it releases metal particles. Studies found aluminum, boron, calcium, iron, copper, magnesium, zinc, lead, chromium, nickel, and manganese in the vapor, all of which vary from really bad news to straight-up toxic and can cause lung irritation, chronic bronchitis, and shortness of breath in the short term. Nickel can also cause cancer when breathed in. All of these mystery substances also interact with each other in new and exciting ways—in bad ways we don't know yet. [ 04:46 ]
What do we know about the health effects of vaping? What does vaping do in your body? The elephant in the room is that we don't know exactly how bad vaping is since it's only been around for about 10 years. Also, most studies on health effects in humans focused on smokers who switch to vapes. We do know for sure that smoking is orders of magnitude more harmful. If you smoke, switching to vaping will reduce your risk of disease massively. If you smoke, please switch to vaping. But these studies also muddy the water a bit. What if you never smoked and started to vape? [ 05:22 ]
In the short term, a significant portion of vapers develop poor breathing symptoms: coughing, extra mucus production, shortness of breath, wheezing, throat and chest pain. But the truth is, we simply don't know what will happen in the long term. The first larger-scale study on vaping with non-smokers only started in 2024. It'll take years before we can say anything with confidence. We can make careful assumptions, but take them with a grain of salt. [ 05:48 ]
Your lungs are made from very sensitive tissue and were never meant to deal with trillions of aerosols, chemicals, and metals. What goes into your lungs generally stays in them forever, which is why smokers' lungs are dark and dirty. It seems that vaping activates the immune system, which tries to clean up the aerosols. This causes inflammation, and fluid seeps into the lungs while the cells guarding their entry produce extra mucus you have to cough out. Some of them may even die. [ 06:18 ]
Vaping also may cause stress all over your body. It may increase your heart rate and blood pressure, lower blood oxygen, or stiffen and clog up your blood vessels. It may create oxidative stress, which has all sorts of bad effects on your organs and may potentially cause many different diseases over time. Does this increase your risk of strokes, heart diseases, lung diseases, or cause cancer? Again, we don't know. Maybe it causes damage, but something else will kill you before vaping does. Maybe it will make you sick, but all we have right now is "maybe." We're conducting one of the largest medical experiments in history. If you are vaping, you're a test subject. [ 06:57 ]
Too much of the wonder drug. What's new about vaping is the sheer amount of nicotine it delivers into your system. For most people, it's kind of hard to smoke 20-plus cigarettes a day because smoking is pretty harsh. As vaping is less aggressive and doesn't smell bad, you can do it inside and constantly for hours. It's easy to go through an entire vape a day. They shower your brain in extremely high nicotine doses, which makes them extremely addictive. For teens, this may be very bad. [ 07:29 ]
During your teenage years, your brain is developing, and your nicotine receptors are especially active. They're directly linked with your reward system and thus how you feel about yourself and your life. Nicotine may change brain development by overstimulating the nicotine receptors. Again, the science is pretty annoying here with loads of caveats. Nicotine in teens has been linked to cognitive deficits, hyperactivity, reduced impulse control, deficits in attention and cognition, and mood disorders. But there's a chicken and egg problem: did nicotine cause this, or are people with a tendency for emotional dysregulation just more likely to use it? [ 08:07 ]
There have been studies that suggest nicotine is a gateway drug, making it more likely to develop other addictions, but this has been largely rejected. Instead, it seems people who are generally more likely to take risks tend to do more risky things. They're more likely to get addicted to smoking, alcohol, or cannabis, hard drugs, or gambling. This doesn't make vaping any less addictive; it just means that it's probably not the cause of other addictions. [ 08:32 ]
Where the science is pretty solid is that most people have a bad time when quitting nicotine. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances we know and comes with a wide range of really unpleasant physical withdrawal symptoms. You can be on edge and experience intense craving for nicotine, unpleasant mood swings, and anxiety. You can have difficulty sleeping, fatigue and headaches, and trouble concentrating. It can be harder to experience joy and to deal with stress, and it can make depression worse. Without nicotine, your suppressed appetite comes back, and since some people compensate by eating more, they put on weight. All of this makes quitting nicotine extremely hard. On top comes psychological addiction that can be intense since vaping is extremely habit-forming. [ 09:19 ]
The good news is that these symptoms are entirely reversible. It takes about 72 hours for the nicotine to leave your body, and the worst withdrawal symptoms fade out or stop entirely in a few weeks. [ 09:31 ]
The problem with vaping is that it's too good. It tastes great, it's pleasant and stimulating, but it also supercharges nicotine and makes it even more addictive. Every smoker who switches from cigarettes to vapes is a win for global health, but this is where the benefits end. Vaping has already hooked a significant portion of the younger generations to nicotine, and that's really bad news. It's kind of unfair to expect young people to resist vaping by providing information about how bad it is or might be. Scaring people straight is a bad strategy. If you're addicted to nicotine, you use it to fight stress. And if you stress someone out by telling them that the thing they use to fight stress is bad, they do the thing to fight the stress you're causing them. [ 10:19 ]
Basically, humans developed a new way to make one of the most addictive substances that was on the decline attractive to millions of teens by making it taste like bubblegum. Vaping is still very new, and we still have a chance to curb this new global addiction before it gets out of control. [ 10:41 ]
Making Cautious Claims
Scientists and public health officials use cautious language to be accurate. In contrast, marketing or advocacy campaigns often use language of certainty to be persuasive. Look at the examples below.
| Language of Certainty (Often for Marketing/Advocacy) | Language of Uncertainty / Caution (Often for Science/Public Health) |
|---|---|
| Vaping is a safe alternative. | Evidence suggests vaping may be less harmful than smoking. |
| Flavors help people quit. | The role of flavors in quitting is still being debated. |
| This will not harm young people. | The long-term effects on youth are not yet fully known. |
| There's no link to smoking. | Some studies indicate a possible association between vaping and future smoking. |
Studio: The Instagram Campaign
Instructions
Your university's health center wants to run a social media campaign about vaping. In a small group, create a three-slide Instagram story to inform your peers. Your goal is to be engaging and factual, not to preach. Use the information from the readings and the language of caution and certainty appropriately.
Slide 1: The Hook. Start with a question or a surprising fact to get attention.
Example: "Vape flavors: What's really in them?"
Slide 2: The Facts. Share 1-2 key pieces of information. Use cautious language for things that are not 100% proven.
Example: "What we know: Most vapes contain nicotine, which is known to be addictive. What's less clear: Scientists are still studying the long-term effects of inhaling flavor chemicals."
Slide 3: The Resource. End with a call to action or a link to a reliable source (like the WHO or your national health service).
Example: "Want to know more? Swipe up for info from the World Health Organization."
Exit: The Communication Challenge
Instructions
Think for a moment by yourself, then share your answer with a partner. In one sentence, explain why it is so difficult for public health officials to create a clear and simple message about the risks of vaping.