My parents are long time smokers. They are both '50s babies. A time when doctors and nurses smoked in the delivery room. If you ask them when they started smoking, my mom admits to trying her first cigarette before she was even a teenager. My Dad began a little later in life, and quit many times, but the sweet taste of nicotine continued to drag him back into its grasp.
My sister (the asthmatic) and I remember many car rides stiffed in smoke. We were getting tired of trying to breathe through the nasty, clouded air. So for Christmas, we decided to invest in both of our parents futures and buy each one of them a vape pen, hearing that vaping was better for your lungs than damaging cigarettes. This “better for you” option comes with a price tag that isn’t necessarily better for everyone.
After hearing a few doubts, I decided to look into things myself. Vaping is popular, and where our parents were invested in cigarettes, our generation is equally obsessed with vaping. I’d like to think as Millennials, we put a little more consideration into what we’re putting in our bodies.
But when it comes to bad habits, is one actually better for you than the other?
It turns out that vaping was actually invented in the early 1960’s by a man named Herbert Gilbert. The 1960’s however; was not an era that believed smoking cigarettes was bad for you.
Big tobacco companies actually preached quite the opposite. Smoking was displayed as sexy, fun and alluring. If you weren’t a smoker, you weren't in style. So who needed anything like a vape pen or E-cigarette?
No one, until the 2000’s.
When the medical field started to discover the true horrors of smoking, people frantically sought healthier alternatives. What could they do to calm their fidgeting and their nerves?
Smoking is now associated with lung cancer, COPD and lung disease. While we've had many years to discover the long term effects of smoking, we haven't had the same opportunity to understand what vaping does over the course of long periods of times.
Vaping, some will argue, is not just a habit, but a life style. There are some positives when it comes to vaping instead of smoking, but the truth is that no one is actually sure what the long term outcomes of vaping are yet. In order to get an idea of both the positive and negative effects of vaping, we are going to have to wait and see what happens.
Plus, it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to get a smoker to convert to vaping.
To understand more about the differences, check out Huffington Post.
