That E-Cigarette Could Be Filling Your Body With Harmful Heavy Metals

Pixabay

Over the past decade, e-cigarettes took over a major component of tobacco territory. Supplying the nicotine high without the additional tar and toxins, e-cigarettes were touted as the “healthier alternative” to traditional cigarettes, either aiding people trying to quit or, quite frankly, making it seem like they didn’t have to worry about quitting at all. But now, research is revealing that this smoking solution really is too good to be true.

A new study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that the heating coils used in e-cigarettes could be leaking heavy metals during use, meaning e-cigarette smokers are inhaling those toxins alongside their beloved nicotine vapor.

The team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined e-cigarette samples from 56 different users. A significant number of e-cigs generated aerosols with potentially harmful levels of lead, chromium, manganese and/or nickel. For lead specifically, almost 50 percent of the aerosol samples tested had concentrations higher than the health-based limits that have been previously defined by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Wikimedia Commons

The inhalation of these heavy metals consistently over time has been scientifically linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular and brain damage. Cancer is included on the risks list as well.

“It’s important for the FDA, the e-cigarette companies and vapers themselves to know that these heating coils, as currently made, seem to be leaking toxic metals — which then get into the aerosols that vapers inhale,” senior study author Ana María Rule, Ph.D., MHS, said in a statement. The Food and Drug Administration is still determining how it could effectively regulate the selling, purchasing and using of e-cigarettes, so findings like these should definitely be considered in that process — especially since those vapors don’t just impact the people intentionally inhaling them.

This study isn’t the first to report heavy metal toxicity in e-cigarette vapors, and it probably won’t be the last. This Johns Hopkins research team, for one, is already planning future studies to explore how this kind of exposure to these toxins impacts the human body.

In the meantime, we are staying far far away from those big clouds of cotton candy-flavored vapor that loom on every city street. They might smell sweeter than tobacco smoke, but that’s about the only good thing they have going for them.