VAPING: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE EFFECT ON LUNG

In the world of favorite vices, vaping remains the Wild West -- there's not a lot of official regulation, the principles aren't firmly in place, along with the social, cultural, and public health impact of vaping is not really clear yet. In the end, vaping has not been around long enough to observe long-term consequences or any long-term studies. We don't have thousands upon thousands of pages of research about the entire body affects, like we do using smoking, and much of what we know about vaping is a combination of conjecture, anecdotal evidence, and opinions that are subjective and circumstantial evidence. The big questions -- Is vape awful for you? Is vaping a drug? Can vaping have side effects? -- are up in the atmosphere. Learn more at SkyBlue Vapor. 

WHAT IS VAPING AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

Everybody knows how smoking works: stained and dried tobacco is wrapped in a newspaper tube, which is then set on fire at one end, while the smoker inhales the smoke through the other end. Vaping is slightly more complicated, even though it needs a lot more electronics as it turns out. In vaping, a device (the vape pen or vape mod) heats a volatile liquid in a cartridge, which the user inhales from the gadget. That's itrather than burning tobacco, a vape only turns a liquid into vapor (oh, that is where they get the name) .

That process is often as simple or a complex as the user needs it to be, and vape fans are nothing if not gear heads. For instance, an LED light which simulates the burning end of a cigarette -- a, feature that is useless, but aesthetically satisfying is included by many e-cigarettes. Middle-of-the-road vape pens may include bells and whistles such as electronics that enable the user to set how much vapor they want the device to give off, while high-end"mods" are totally customizable, and, obviously, way more expensive.

The second part of the procedure -- the"smoke" -- offers as much variation as the gadget. As an exhaustive article in Gizmodo by a vape manufacturer explains, the main ingredients in e-liquid -- or, as it is more broadly (and ickily) known as, vape juice -- are all fairly simple: glycerin, for the clouds of vapor; propylene glycol, for the flavoring to bind to; flavoring, for... well, flavor; and nicotine, that is obtained as a pure, pharmaceutical-grade concentrate.