Student Resources

Flavored Air Dangers

Breanna Neely, Journalist

December 9, 2024

What are you going to do when it’s time to run?

Smoking or vaping may lead to permanent scarring of the smallest branches of the airways (popcorn lung) which makes breathing difficult. This makes it almost impossible to run, because you have to breathe a lot and breath fast when you run, so that your body can keep up with the pace you’re running at.

Vaping and smoking E-Cigarettes can cause irreversible lung damage. E-Cigarettes produce a number of dangerous chemicals including acetaldehyde, acrolein, and formaldehyde. These aldehydes can cause lung disease, as well as cardiovascular disease (heart disease). E Cigarettes also contain acrolein, an herbicide primarily used to kill weeds. It can cause acute lung injury and COPD and may cause asthma and lung cancer.

Vaping / smoking is very addicting and can lead you to do it all of the time whenever you get a chance, which severely ruins your health. Nicotine is toxic to developing fetuses and is a health danger for pregnant women as well.

Nicotine is highly toxic and does more harm than pleasure. Teens think it’s cool or relieving their stress to vape and smoke, but in reality, it’s just making things worse than they already are. It’s very toxic and will lead to so many irreversible health effects that can eventually kill you.

Acute nicotine exposure can be toxic. Children and adults have been poisoned by swallowing, breathing, or absorbing vaping liquid through their skin or eyes. More than 80% of calls to the U.S. Poison control centers for E-cigarettes are for children less than 5 years old.

Smoking is especially dangerous to youths because their brains are still developing; nicotine can harm your brain development which continues until around the age of 25. Youths can start showing signs of nicotine addiction before they even start to use it every day, or regular use. Using nicotine during adolescence can harm parts of the brain that control attention, learning, mood, and impulse control. Young ones who use nicotine may also be at an increased risk for future drug addictions and are more likely to smoke cigarettes in the future.

Vaping is a significant danger to you and others around you. They can blow up and cause an explosion if defective; most of the time defective E-cigarettes have blown up while charging, which leads to an extreme risk to you and others around you.

E-cigarettes have shown to cause withdrawal symptoms when not taking nicotine, a very addictive chemical. When someone who’s addicted to nicotine stops using it, their body and brain have to adjust. This can result in temporary symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, which may include feeling irritable, jumpy, restless, or anxious, feeling sad or down, having trouble sleeping, having a hard time concentrating, feeling hungry, craving nicotine, etc.

Long-term use of electronic cigarettes, or vaping products, can significantly impair the function of the body’s blood vessels, increasing the risk for cardiovascular disease. Additionally, the use of both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes may cause an even greater risk than the use of either of these products alone. Blood from those who used e-cigarettes also caused more permeability in the blood vessel cells than the blood from both those who smoked cigarettes and nonusers. Blood from those that used e-cigarettes also caused a greater release of hydrogen peroxide by the blood vessel cells than the blood of the nonusers. Each of these three factors can contribute to an impairment of blood vessel function in people who use E-cigarettes.

Once this irreversible damage is done, there isn’t a single component that you could remove to stop the damaging effect of smoke or vapors on the blood vessels. As long as there’s an irritant in the airway, blood vessel function may be impaired.

Even though the specific components of cigarette smoke or E-cigarette vapor aren’t solely responsible for blood vessel damage, using special arterial flow measurements, it shows that blood vessel damage does not appear to be caused by a specific component of cigarette smoke or e-cigarette vapor. It appears to be caused by airway irritation that triggers biological signals in the vagus nerve that somehow leads to blood vessel damage, possibly through an inflammatory process.

The vagus is a long nerve extending from the brain that connects the airway to the rest of the nervous system and plays a key role in the heart rate, breathing, and other functions. Chronic systemic exposure to nicotine from cigarette smoking may contribute to accelerated coronary and peripheral vascular disease, acute cardiac ischemic events, delayed wound healing, reproductive disturbances, peptic ulcer disease, and esophageal reflux, which can also in some cases lead to death from consuming vapor or E-liquid.

In conclusion, using these products can and will lead to irreversible damage that you cannot undo. It’s going to do so much damage to your body even without you feeling the effects most of the time. Consistent use of these products will affect your brain, lead to brain cancer and heart or lung disease, and can lead you to fatal consequences. It gets in your bloodstream and does things your body can’t handle. So, your body resorts to extreme measures to try and rid your body of these things, and when it can’t do that, you suffer from it, and it might even be painful. So don’t use these products at all. You’ll save yourself so much damage and depression.

Vaping may seem like a harmless trend, but it comes with serious risks to our health and well-being. It’s a gateway to addiction, lung damage, and long-term health complications. Choosing to vape today may seem like a small decision, but it can lead to long-term consequences. Don´t let temporary pleasure rob you and your future!

Don’t be afraid to ask for help! The number below is a helpline from USA.gov. They will help you with substance abuse and mental health referrals as well, providing counseling and treatment options. You can call today at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).